Many multiple files versus few larger files hosted by IIS7 + Windows Server 2008

Question

Can you point me to best practices for file hosting in IIS 7. The number of files can be very high > 500,000, 2-10KB each.

A possible concern is the performance with such a large number of files. We could have a smaller number of larger files and have a HTTP handler to process the requests or just have the smaller files and use IIS7 to directly serve them as static files.

Are there any best practices/performance comparisons that you can share? What do you recommend?

Answer 1

One consideration is the performance implications of having lots of files in one directory - most file systems are not optimised for performance of finding one file in a directory containing 1000000 or more files. You will probably get better performance by structuring your file system to have only a few files in each directory.