I actually used a system back in 1997 that used exactly this data store system but with a proprietary encoding rather than JSON. It worked really well in a sing

I actually used a system back in 1997 that used exactly this data store system but with a proprietary encoding rather than JSON. It worked really well in a single-user single-process capacity but we had to adjust the block size of the filesystem so we didn't run out of inodes quickly. The only killer was when some muppet put it on an NFS share when they were trying to be clever and get it working for 5 users. Every failure mode possible turned up at once. Edit: also to keep directory lookups cheap, it used nested filesystem prefix-based: /a/b/c/1/abc112341982389129382 for example.