>>This is a systems which has evolved over many years, it started with a Novell server, but now I use W2K servers. It may be that the perfomance on the W2K servers is not improved by spreading the pictures, but there are other factors involved also. One issue is when you use the explorer, if you "accidentally" open a directory with 6 millions pictures, I can assure you that you will first hit ctrl-alt-del, then you go for a cup of coffee, or take lunch. :-)
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>Indeed, opening in Explorer is a point I hadn't thought of.
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>Well, right now my system uses about 20 images (users are just starting to use the "picture" feature); potentially, this can grow to a few thousand pictures (one for each shoe model), so (in my case) there is probably no reason to worry. Especially since the data is stored on NTFS.

You definitely don't want to store too many files in any single folder. Based on my experience cleaning out people's \Temp folders, a couple of thousand seems OK, five to seven thousand, the machine starts getting sluggish, 66,000 it's dead slow.

How did someone end up with 66,000 files in their temp folder? Interesting story...

They were trying to run Acrobat Reader 7 on Windows XP. Wouldn't work - hung when run, couldn't uninstall due to weird error messages etc.

I thought of doing an antivirus/antispyware scan. But before I do that I always clean out the user's temp files folder and IE temporary internet files folder (the latter can easily hold more than half the total files on a computer!) so the scans run quicker. When I checked the user's temp folder there were over 66,000 files in it.

Most of them were in the format AcrXXXX.tmp, where X is a value from 0 to F (similar to hexadecimal). These are temp files that Acrobat attempts to create when it starts. As it happens, 4 digits ranging from 0 to F give you 65,536 different file names. Somehow, all the possible file names were already used up so Acrobat couldn't create a different one!

Deleting all those files took somewhere between 40 minutes and 1 hour. It would have taken a lot longer if I hadn't:

- limited selection of files to delete to batches of ~15 - 20,000 at most. Anything more seemed to hang

- remembered to turn off the Norton Protected Recycle Bin before I started

- killed process on Windows Explorer after it reported each batch of files deleted, but before it tried to read the ones that were left (which would take as long or longer than the batch delete itself)

In hindsight I probably should have tried a DEL/ERASE from a CMD prompt - it might have been massively quicker. Maybe next time ;)