Not sure exactly how you are cleaning up, or what your criteria is, but the find utility should also be able to do what you want. For example, to remove files older than 30 days, you could do something like:

find /path/to/you/directory -type -f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;
[download]

This may take a long time first time around, depending on how many files you have, and the previous comments about the actual size of the directory and other inodes still stand.