title: What are the downsides of longer directory paths/names and URL's on a LAMP site?
body: <p>What are the downsides of longer directory paths/names and URL's on a LAMP site?</p>
  
  <p>I am trying to organize images on my sites as efficiently as possible, and I'm keen on using many nested directories so that no sub-directory has more than 1,000 sub-directories.</p>
  
  <p>In a worst-case scenario, images would be stored looking something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>./images/76/543/7654321/640/1.jpg
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Are there any serious downsides to having so many sub-directories vs. something simpler like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>./i/a7/c3/5e.jpg
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I suppose the more sub-directories the Server has to dig in to, the longer it's going to take, and the longer the directory structure is, the longer the URL will be, so the more space the HREF will take up in the HTML doc.  But how much of a difference will that make?  Let's say we scale up to millions of users, is this something I need to take into consideration (short dir structure vs long dir structrue)?</p>
  
  <p>For context, please view <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6877771/what-is-the-fastest-and-most-efficient-way-of-storing-and-fetching-images-when-yo">this</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>