>>The worst I've seen was 1500 files in one directory, and the system was darn slow with that app (other apps which used shorter directories were comparably faster). It was back in DOS 5.0 and, well, we were told that whenever you are opening a file, the DOS searches the directory sequentially. Since then, I'm trying to reduce the number of files my apps use. Now with W9x and NT, I'm not sure anymore - does the OS still search the directory sequentially, or is it finally indexed (I remember VAX VMS had indexed directories 14 years ago)?
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>Under NT, with NTFS, there's an index; NTFS degrades smoothly as the number of files/directory increases, regardless of whether it's being accessed by NT or Win95 across a network. With both NT and Win95, FAT directories still use a sequential search, including empty/deleted directory entries, making FAT the least desirable file system for overpopulated directories, as well as when performing non-sequential I/O on files. NetWare caches and hashes its directories, which makes NetWare seem blazingly fast on directory searches.

Thanks for this update - I don't know if I could find it all in one place anywhere else.

The implications of this directory layout lead me to the conclusion that much of the W95/98 is rather clumsy. The concept of using directories for menus and other stuff - reminds me of a (Clipper) programmer who stored each invoice in a separate table. Come to think that the menus and shortcuts are supposed to be a quick way to access things on your disk, and this quick access uses the slowest approach available. One FPD2.x DBF with memos would be damn faster than that.