topic Re: Limit on number of subdirectories has been removed in DOT 8.1, so what? in ONTAP Hardware

Limit on number of subdirectories has been removed in DOT 8.1, so what?

pedro_rocha — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:25:40 GMT

Hell all,

I would like to understand one thing. I have been facing an issue in a FAS3240. This system has a flexvol accessed via CIFS.

Occurs that data is written in the share of this flexvol by an application which creates lots of directories inside one root directory on the volume.

I know that on DOT versions earlier than 8.1, there was a limit of 100K (99,998) subdirectories in a directory, right? I also know from the following link, that this limit has been removed in DOT 8.1.

https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1120690/html/GUID-E68C414B-D865-4C6F-882F-02CD8614F327.html

I thought this limit was something important to protect the client from reaching a huge number of subdirectories and with this, facing performance issues while accessing it. Without this limit, how performance is handled? Am I missing anything? Is it safe to store more than those 100K subdirs and not having any kind of performance degradation?

Kind regards,

Pedro Rocha.

Re: Limit on number of subdirectories has been removed in DOT 8.1, so what?

christin — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 18:36:35 GMT

Hi Pedro,

Additional information regarding the removal of the subdirectory limitation can be found in the following KB article:

https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&id=3012261

If you need further assistance, I recommend posting this in the Support Community. If your issue is urgent, please open a case with NetApp Support.

Regards,

Christine

Re: Limit on number of subdirectories has been removed in DOT 8.1, so what?

pedro_rocha — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:38:47 GMT

Hello Christine,

I've seen that kb article it helps explaining things. But I am still curious about how performance is handled now.

Regards,

Pedro