Large image directory

[jankal7003]

Hi,

Our graphics/00000001 directory has 167 folders and 8,497 files for a total of 555,763 KB. What is the most efficient way to manage it? Should I take away all the sub-directories and pay for extra bandwidth? How much would that slow the website?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Large image directory

Having the images spread amongst multiple directories is actually far better for performance so if you've go things set that way now, it would be best to leave things that way. A future update to the software aims to perform this type of directory distribution for you as currently the images are all placed into one, which can cause a performance penalty on very large sites.

Having no more than a few thousand files per directory is best for performance. The reason is that the operating system must read the directory index each time it accesses a file within the given directory, so the larger the index is, from having more files, the more work is done and more time wasted. A nice even distribution of files amongst many directories increases performance in comparison to having them all in one folder.

The really hard part is managing the images from an "am I still using this image?" perspective. My understanding is that is being worked on as well.

[jankal7003]

Re: Large image directory

Thanks for the very early quick response!

If you say, "A future update to the software aims to perform this type of directory distribution for you as currently the images are all placed into one, which can cause a performance penalty on very large sites." Do you mean that MIVA will soon be able to upload to sud-directories in the 00000001 directory? If so, will that happen in the next few months?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Large image directory

Unfortunately not soon; I've been told this is a feature that will arrive with the next major version. Rick does not like giving dates on those releases because there are a multitude of reasons the dates can move up or move back, so we prefer to not set a date expectation that may not be met. It would probably be safe to say a wide swath of mid-2016 is when you'd see it.