>It reminds me of something in Eric Raymonds "The Art of Unix Programming" (I don't have time to find the link right now) where it discussed an approach from th

>It reminds me of something in Eric Raymonds "The Art of Unix Programming" (I don't have time to find the link right now) where it discussed an approach from the earlier days of Linux filesystems where you had a limit on the number of iNodes that could exist in a single directory and corresponding performance. The work around was to create a subdirectory structure to store files based on the filename. But then you tended to get many files starting with the same characters all in the same directories. What turned out to be a better way to distribute the files evenly in the directory structure was to take the first and _last_ character of the file name and use those to create the subdirectories. This way you were more likely to spread the files evenly across the structure. Interesting. I have been pondering over filesystem performance and inode limits in servers/home-servers since a long time. This seems useful infomration