Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Apache + max number of files per directory

[Netwidemedia]

Does anyone have any idea why, when I put a directory containing about 5000 .html files up on my webserver that the load average would just start to shoot up radically? The server is fine as long as this directory is not under any directory readable by Apache. The minute I try to load up the index.html file in this directory the load goes crazy. I'm using CentOS4 with the latest Apache, blah blah blah. Filesystem is ReiserFS. Any suggestions welcome. It's fairly important also that I find a way to keep all 5000 of these .html files in one directory rather than seperating them out into smaller subdirectories. Server is a Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz with 2GB of RAM and the hard drives are SATA 133's. Thanks in advance!

[DigitalN]

It's fairly important also that I find a way to keep all 5000 of these .html files in one directory rather than seperating them out into smaller subdirectories

What is the need to keep them all within 1 directory?

[Netwidemedia]

Problem solved! It wasn't a problem with maximum files per directory after all... it was that a Macromedia Flash file that is on each page also was looking for a .txt file to be in the same directory which wasn't there... and it kept requesting it over and over and over and over... Bringing Apache to its knees. Very strange, but that fixed it. I wouldn't think that one missing .txt file would bring a Dual Xeon to its knees but it sure did.