server file limits

I recently took on a project where the previous developer was also administering the server and didn't seem to be expert at either. The biggest problem is she was dynamicly creating a new subdirectory for each "member" who joined the site. She was also creating virtual host records to point a tld at the subdirectory. The problem is there are 9000+ members and growing. The file structure is giant and getting worse.

imagine a site called:
www.mywebstore.com and every single member had a directory called
www.mywebstore.com/userid
instead of using mod_rewrite to make the server see
www.mywebstore.com/userid as
www.mywebstore.com/index.php?id=userid
which would put the users into 9000 db records instead of 9000 directories. I'm very worried that the server performance is being seriously impacted by this situation and it's only going to get worse because they sell dozens of sites a day. This could easily be 50,000 directories in the next year.

does anyone know what the directory limitations are?

any ideas on what should be done?

right now the domains the users buy also point at the subdirectoy and I'm not entirely sure how to point them at the main page and have the server know the user id. I guess I could read the URL info and correlate that to the user in the db, but is there a problem with having 50,000 domain pointers?

If you mean what the actual limits concerning the filesystem are (meaning how many files and directories you can have), well, it depends on which filesystem you're running. According to Wikipedia, ext3 has the following:



On the other hand, if it's a Windows server and you're running NTFS, it has a fixed limit of 4,294,967,295 (or 2³² − 1) files.

If you meant how many directories you can have before the server slows down a lot, well, that's very difficult for me to answer.