And they send shivers down my spine <| sep |> If too many blank files are created , you end up having a lot of these empty and useless files in memory and being written to disk , which can slow down performance . Yes , but not really for the reasons you cite . The lots of files in a directory problem a recurring issue I ' ve seen in our industry because , sadly , young app programmers are brought up believing that all server resources are infinite with blind trust in the interpretercompiler to fix performance problems becomes a issue when a directory is opened for reading , ie an opendir followed by the bomb readdir . When readdir is ran on the opened directory , the OS ' s DNLC is interrogated to see if the inodes for files within that directory are cached there hence the name Directory Name Lookup Cache and then because the DNLC is of finite size and not everything might be cached the code path proceeds to the VFS layer , which then actuates the readdir hook implemented by the underlying filesystem . This is when things get shitty . Typical filesystems must then pull the inode data off of disk , and how this inode data is arranged on the ondisk format greatly influences how performant this is . With mechanical hard drives , the problems regarding performance can be readily obvious especially if there is contending IO . SSDs solve that problem greatly , but are merely a bruteforce solution to a problem that should be avoided in the first place by the app not being shit , as the DNLC is still faster , but it caches on entire directories so having huge directories of even a few hundred files is suboptimal . This is why hashed paths were invented long ago .