Hmm... yeah... there's yer problem right there...

[Greg]

I'm amazed your machine was even still functioning.

One of our servers had some odd performance issues, that were traced to some application 'architects' not understanding how filesystems work and putting over a million files in the same directory. They didn't see the issue with that. When I pointed it out to our own lead architect, he was not happy.

[BobbyK]

Dafuq? That's moderately impressive.

[randy]

'architects' not understanding how filesystems work and putting over a million files in the same directory.

Reminds me of DOS days when a customer brought a machine with a new 100MB HDD that was giving disk full errors even though he had only installed DOS.

Turns out his method of installing DOS was to copy all the files from the install disks into the root directory...

[Weetabix]

'architects' not understanding how filesystems work and putting over a million files in the same directory.

Reminds me of DOS days when a customer brought a machine with a new 100MB HDD that was giving disk full errors even though he had only installed DOS.

Turns out his method of installing DOS was to copy all the files from the install disks into the root directory...

Reminds ME of DOS days when an office worker discovered the joys of layered directories and had so many directories that the file name length limited out. Can't remember if it was 128 characters or 256, but the tail end of the entire file name couldn't be read. She was something else.

I also had to read-only the files in the root directory so people wouldn't clean out "all that useless junk."

Ah. Strolls down memory lane.

[Captain Wheelgun]

'architects' not understanding how filesystems work and putting over a million files in the same directory.

Reminds me of DOS days when a customer brought a machine with a new 100MB HDD that was giving disk full errors even though he had only installed DOS.

Turns out his method of installing DOS was to copy all the files from the install disks into the root directory...

Reminds ME of DOS days when an office worker discovered the joys of layered directories and had so many directories that the file name length limited out. Can't remember if it was 128 characters or 256, but the tail end of the entire file name couldn't be read. She was something else.

I also had to read-only the files in the root directory so people wouldn't clean out "all that useless junk."

Ah. Strolls down memory lane.

And this reminds me of a couple of customers I had back when I worked for Radio Shack. One customer's standard solution to any problem was to reinstall Windows. (This was back when Windows was just a UI shell on top of DOS) Guy finally couldn't make it work, so he brought it to me. When I checked the directory, this thing had C:\Windows\Windows\Windows\Windows\Windows\Windows\Windows\Windows....... I lost count of how many nested Windows installs he had on there. Of course, this ended up needing a full format & clean install.

Which brings us to the customer whose standard solution to any problem was to format his HDD. I wound up renaming format.com to calldave.com to break this habit. It must have worked, I never saw him or got a call from him again.

[Draven]

some guys I was working on a project with back in the win95 days once deleted a 'big file on their hard drive' to 'save space'

why yes, they were using a drive compression utility. Why yes, they did delete the compressed drive file.