Ext3 file count limits

[Aaron Konstam]

On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 07:23 -0600, Shelby, James wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what the actual limit is for an ext3 filesystem?
> I’ve done some google searching and according to the wiki it seems 32k
> directories and 32k files however I have seen that people have
> reported 3 million+ files which doesn’t seem there is a real limit in
> the code.
> 
>  
> 
> I’m trying to find out what happens which you exceed that 32k as we
> previously had 200k files in multiple directories which on those
> drives we had a 70%+ failure rate.  Those drives were Western Digital
> 2TB RE4 which seemed to have an excess high failure rate.  After
> finding this limitation we migrated the data to XFS and in the past
> four months have not seen a single reallocated sector in the SMART
> data.  I’m wondering if it is possible this could be related or if it
> was just a bad group of drives.  Note that we had several drives
> warranty replaced and even those drives were failing within two months
> until the filesystem type change.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks
> 
> James
> 
>  
> 
> 

Looks like it might be controlled by an option in mkfs.ext3.
-- 
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When the going gets tough, everyone leaves. -- Lynch
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Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net