My web applications needs to store and retrieve data files created by the application users (these files are log files that originate from a monitoring device that the app user uses). A typical file is less than 10KB big. Each such file has a creation date attribute. Usually a user would upload and ask to retrieve several files created on adjustment days at one time.
My question is, should I design my file handing code to concatenate several user files on adjacent dates and store them together as one file to optimize server performance? IOW, should I be worried about reducing the number of file fetches? Last, is there a limit, on Linux, to the number of files that can be placed inside a folder?
Thanks, Avi