Fedora 4 can handle a large number of objects, but performance degrades if there are too many children and/or grandchildren of a single node.
Federated filesystem
Files in a single directory
Using a single directory to hold an increasing number of files, listing the files in the directory scales roughly linearly up to around 3,000 files, then degrades sharply. Using paging to list only 1,000 files in a batch makes the degradation a slightly less severe.
Files in a hierarchy
Using a three-level hierarchy (256 top-level nodes, 256 second-level nodes in each, 256 third-level nodes in each, and one 10KB datastream in each), performance retrieving files and listing the second-level nodes did not degrade with larger numbers of objects. However, listing the top-level of the repository ("toplist" in the chart below) degraded roughly linearly as more objects were added, and became increasing erratic.
