4 Replies Latest reply on Feb 28, 2008 9:39 PM by Jeff Sweeney

    44,500 files in one directory

    Jeff Sweeney
    Jeff Sweeney Dec 6, 2007 6:06 PM

      I have always heard as a rule of thumb when working withPDMWorks Workgroup - for performance reasons try to keep the numberof files in a directory to less than 1000. Figured that sincePDMWorks Enterprise uses SQL there would be no limit to the numberof files I put into a directory. So for fun I took 44,500 files andcopied them into one directory in the vault. As expected, PDMWorksEnterprise can handle that many files and searching on them isstill crazy fast (still less than a second for a typical search.)The downside is browsing into the directory with Explorer.

      3 minutes 42 seconds to open the directory when the files were inthe cache, 2 minutes 15 seconds when the cache was empty. Comparethis to 8 seconds to open a copy of the directory that was outsidethe vault.


      It took about 90 seconds when browsing through the directory withthe "Open" dialog box in SolidWorks -even with the "SolidWorksFiles" type filter turned on.


      Drat. Looks like Enterprise cannot take the place of common sense.Smaller directories are better.


      PDMWorks Enterprise 2008, Windows XP

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        • 44,500 files in one directory
          Michael Ferree
          Michael Ferree Dec 6, 2007 7:25 PM (in response to Jeff Sweeney)
          Is your PDM server at your site or is it at a remote location?
          • 44,500 files in one directory
            Jeff Sweeney
            Jeff Sweeney Dec 6, 2007 7:46 PM (in response to Jeff Sweeney)
            These slower results were seen in this directory only, the other"normal" sized directories in this vault seem unaffected.
            • 44,500 files in one directory
              Jeff Sweeney
              Jeff Sweeney Feb 28, 2008 9:39 PM (in response to Jeff Sweeney)
              Since Ken asked in another post, and I was curious, and SolidWorks reported they improved the performance of a large number of files in a directory in a recent service pack I thought I would try this experiment again.

              44,500 files is rather unmanageable so I thought I would try on a more realistic scale.

              Once I got more 3,000 files in one directory is the first I felt Windows Explorer/PDMWorks Enterprise was bogging down a little. It took about four seconds for all the files to populate in the files area.

              I threw in the towel at 6,000 files, at this point the speed seem unreasonable to work with in a design environment. It took a little more than 12 seconds for the files to populate. Yet even then, once the files did populate, clicking on the files to see datacards or previews was pretty snappy.

              Other directories and searches seemed unaffected by this one large test directory. So from this test, the total number of files in the vault doesn't matter, just how many files in one directory at a time.

              PDMWE 2008 Service Pack 2, local database server, Windows XP.