Rackspace cloud files: how to size containers to optimize performance?

Rackspace cloud files uses a flat storage system using 'containers' to store files. According to Rackspace there is no limit to the number of files per container.

My question is whether there is a best/most efficient number of files per container to optimize write/fetch performance.

If I have tens of thousands of files to store, should they all go in a single giant container or partitioned into many smaller containers? And if so, what is the optimal container size开发者_Python百科?

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FYI: [Snippets taken from rackspace support]

long story short, the containers are databases, and the more rows in a table, the more time it takes to write them on standard hardware. When a write hasn't been committed to disk, it sits in a queue, and it subject to data loss. It's something we noticed with large containers, and the more objects, the more likely it was, so we instituted the limits to protect the data.

because of the rate limits, your data is safe, it just slows down the writes a bit

the limits starts as low as 50,000 objects, and at that level it limits you to 100 writes per second

by 1,000,000 objects in a container, it's 25 per second

and at 5 million and above, you're down to 4 writes per second

We apologize for the limitations, and will be updating our documentation to more clearly express this.

-This has recently hurt us quite badly. Thought I'd share until they get there API doc's upto date, so others can plan around this issue.

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We recommend no more than 1 million objects per container. The system will return a maximum of 10,000 object names per list request by default.

Update 9/20/2013 from Cloud Files development: The 1 million object per container recommendation is no longer accurate since Cloud Files switched to all SSD container servers. Also, the list is limited to 10,000 containers at a time.