Folders with high file counts

We field a lot of support requests, and similar to a doctor's
office, we see some extreme cases. One of those interesting extreme
cases are folders with high file counts. Any time a folder has more
than a few thousand items in it, the filesystem is going to be a
lot slower when working with that folder. Adding a new file, for
example, requires that the filesystem compare the new item name to
the name of every other file in the folder to check for conflicts,
so trivial tasks like that will take progressively longer as the
file count increases. Gathering the enormous file list will also
take progressively longer as the list gets larger. The performance
hit is even more noticeable on rotational disks and network
volumes, so we often see these sticking out in backup tasks.

Sometimes high folder counts can bring a backup task to a
halt

Last week, one of our users found the task as shown above. Upon
closer analysis, we determined that the "media" folder had 181,274
files in it. In other words, more than 10% of the files on
the...