DOS suffered from visible performance degradation when handling long directories. It might be the same for your web server's OS, so maybe a limit was imposed.
It is common to use a system like
...
i/ik/ikegami
...
v/vi/vit
...
to keep the number of directory entries manageable.
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[d/l] |
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If you have shell access, check out man quota.
Update: In a past life, fraught with student users who thought Unix was spelled with an 'E', I enforced some pretty harsh quotas for new accounts. These were, however, relaxed into a larger pool for the asking, and could even be expanded to some pretty extreme values with a faculty sponsor (for research or the like). I would typically not refuse requests into the larger pools (my job was to support the education), and automation (quite a bit with Perl, IIRC) made applying these quota pools very easy and flexible. They were set up to avoid non-terminating loops from filling the user file systems, and keep the student Unix network more reliable.
Assuming that quotas are in place, talk to your vendor. They may have a quota in place to help keep one customer from impacting another (at least without giving the admins time to respond). If this is the case, they may not have a problem with either (1) raising your quota (perhaps for a price), or (2) you storing some select files in a filestore of some sort, for example, a ZIP, YAML, DBM::Deep, or some other type of file.
It may also be time to re-architect how you are storing your data files.
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[d/l] |
and is it possible to trick it in perl when writing files into the directory?
No, besides, trying to trick it would probably violate the terms of service. | [reply] |
There is nothing about it in Terms of Service and this came up all of a sudden.
My question is if this is typical in file systems used by host providers. I never heard about such things myself.
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Careening off into mere supposition:
- The TOS were probably written by a lawyer.
- You don't write like a lawyer; therefore you are probably not a lawyer
- Therefore, the TOS probably mean something neither your nor I would recognize without instruction by a lawyer
- Therefore, the apparent absence of any direct reference to consequences of evading the restriction is probably meaningless.
Or, summarizing and condensing, when you get the notion to do something "clever" to evade a restriction that may have legal foundation or support, don't.
:-)
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It's not clear from your question if the limit is 8000 files total, or 8000 files per directory. Maybe all you have to do is organize the files into sub directories. Having too many files in a single directory can cause performance problems, which is probably why the hosting company has that limit in the first place.
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