How much better to store files in one folder 256 or 4096?

Question

linux

DD. Yes, the question has been raised more than once, but now I have live data in my hands - a bunch of small files, naturally we spread everything into subfolders, we have the ability to split 256 subfolders / files into one directory or 4096, in the first case there are three levels, in the second two:
/d5/fc/39/ vs /d5f/c39/
What is better to choose here? On the one hand, 256 files are somehow small (?) in one folder, and on the other hand, 4096 are a lot (?) for one folder?

Answer 1

ext4 - don't care
If there is a need to watch files manually, then it all depends on your file browser

Answer 2

I have a file server. The photo archive contains directories with a large number of files, more than 256.

Answer 3

This is not directly related to your question, but look at your system for limiting the number of open files:

[email protected] ~ $ ulimit -n -S
1024
[email protected] ~ $ ulimit -n -H
4096

In principle, this can suggest the order of the (convenient) number of files in one directory.

Answer 4

Depends only on the file system. Let's say reiserfs somehow doesn't work very fast if there are millions of files in the directory. And about btrfs reviews are much better.