I've got a folder where I check out projects I need to work on, there are about 40 project folders in there, with many thousands of individual files each. Our IT manager says having so many files on the disk is slowing down my machine... can this be true? I have about 40GB of free space.
A:
No.
The number of files on disk has no correlation to the speed of the machine.
So maybe you would like to get a better IT guy. Superstition and voodoo beliefs is the corner stone of an IT department who doesn't really know it's doing.
shoosh
2009-04-09 15:01:30
Actually, depending on the OS, file system, OS shell, and file organization, the number of files on disk can have a huge impact on the speed of the machine.
Mihai Limbășan
2009-04-09 15:02:49
In case you don't believe me: Use Windows, Windows Explorer, NTFS, TortoiseSVN, enable its icon overlays (on by default), check out 40 project folders with a lot of small files under source control, reboot to clean the checkout cache bias, navigate to that folder, and enjoy the slowness.
Mihai Limbășan
2009-04-09 15:05:38
Yes, a large directory can slow down access to that directory. Just be existing, however, if the directory is never accessed, it won't slow anything down.
Eddie
2009-04-10 04:46:52
A:
Having a large numeber of files in a single directory can significantly slow down some operations. The creation of a large number of files can hog many indexing facilities. Apart from that, there should be no problems if the files are just sitting there.
UncleZeiv
2009-04-09 15:05:30
True in principle. But as noted in the comment on shoosh's answer, files just sitting there can slow down cache / working copy crawlers such as TSvnCache.exe or the explorer.exe in-process variant, in turn slowing down the machine and/or the shell.
Mihai Limbășan
2009-04-09 15:07:27