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If I were talking about a web hosting server, would there be a maximum limit of files per directory?

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Any particular OS and file system you're interested in? Surprisingly, this matters. – John Gardeniers Oct 4 '10 at 2:44
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You need to be more specific because that limit is contingent on the OS and the web server. – Satanicpuppy Oct 4 '10 at 2:45
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It comes down to filesystem in most cases:

FAT-16: 512

FAT-32: 65,534

NTFS has a maximum number of files per volume, not directory: 4,294,967,295 (via Satanicpuppy)

ext2: 31,998

ext3 originally had the same limit at ext2 (31,998). However, if your distro supports dir_index I believe the only limit is your machine's ram with deteriorating performance as the directory grows beyond 100k files.

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ext3 isn't that straightforward. The number you've listed is the directory limit(the maximum number of directories in a directory), which is separate from the maximum number of files in a directory. If your distro supports dir_index, then you can store ~200,000 files in a directory. – Satanicpuppy Oct 5 '10 at 0:16
Also the number you've given for NTFS is whacky: that's the maximum number of files in an entire NTFS volume, not a directory. NTFS being NTFS, if you have a volume with 1 directory, it can have 4,294,967,295 files in it, but if you have two directories, or two-hundred, they can contain in total, no more than 4,294,967,295 files. – Satanicpuppy Oct 5 '10 at 0:19
Additionally, some versions of Windows shell32.dll will spazz out if it tries to list more than 1 million files in a single directory. – Chris Thorpe Oct 5 '10 at 23:32
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not quite sure what you mean. If you mean can a host set up a maximum file usage then yea. My host, hostgator has a 50,000 inode limit or something like that. that means any more than 50,000 files and I get banned.

If you mean like filesystems if you can set that up quotas. You can in Linux, I am sure there must be some mechanic for windows as well.

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/Introduction_To_System_Administration/s2-storage-quotas.html

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Ok, my mistake, I mean in one folder, what is the maximum number of files can be stored in one folder? – Burning the Codeigniter Oct 4 '10 at 3:19
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