Speaking of photo albums...

Others have posted on this but I feel the need to do it again.

Whose bright idea was it to dump ALL the photos in the same folder on the server? Has anyone undertaken the task of creating a hierarchical folder photo storage setup? (like storing photos by either owner or better yet, owner/album?)

My Indycar racing site that I have built for my racing buddies and myself will very quickly have many thousands of images. The current system of storage is a PIG!!!

I think this was done because most file systems can only hold X amount of sub folders.  not 100% sure on this one.

Ok, I found this.

Before I paste the link, after reading this, i feel bad for those of you running your sites on an NTFS system (lol). I am no longer going to worry about this issue as long as I'm on a linux platform.

http://www.frank4dd.com/howto/various/maxfiles-per-dir.htm

ohh!!!!!!!!!!  good

i am on linux hosting..........:)

 32bit OS had directory limits, there were work-arounds, and on 64bit OS, this problem no longer exists. 

the limit was on subdirectories, and based on the tree heirarchy, is where it would fail. 

From what I am reading, the limit for files in a directory in linux is virtually nonexistent. Having said that though, most agree that you would start seeing speed degradation at about 10,000 files.Also, trying to open a folder with that many files into a shell would be an exercise in exasperating futility.

Subdirectories, like you mentioned earlier Dawg, are limited to about 32000 (more for 64k setups) and with long file names can be a bit less.

I can see achieving 10,000 files in the photo folder very easily with my current 600 member base. Probably already halfway there. I still think breaking it down at least one more level by adding folders for each member will increase my file capacity to a level that will be hard to exceed and still be manageable speedwise.

If I ever get to a level where I am nearing 32000 members (one can only wish) I am sure I'll have enough ad revenue to buy my own server farm... (wink).

 yeah, and this is wher.e load balancers, and scaling come into play. i would presume, though there a no benchmarks to base performance on, once you reach a certain level of success, i would recommend moving into a cloud environment.

why do i say that, because it is somewhat beneficial when you start scaling your application. with cloud technology today, there are many great options, such as adding resources on the fly, such as what would have benefitted one of the unity members the other day who promoted their site, and when launched, i think it was shutdown in some method, i would lend this to the setup, and not being prepared for high-level traffic.

CDN is another great concept, that can in conjunction with load balancers, and scaling the application, and cloud hosting, that can increase performance

 yeah, buy your own server farm, thats another great set of headaches. LOL