Do too many files hurt a directory?

From: Charlie Gibbs (cgibbs_at_kltpzyxm.invalid)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: 26 Mar 04 09:31:13 -0800

A process went wild at a customer site the other night, and started
creating files with gay abandon. When the staff came in the next
morning, the system was extremely sluggish. I dialed in and found
that over 280,000 files had been created, all in the same directory.
All of the files belong to root (the user kicked off the process's
parent under the wrong ID), and most of them are empty or nearly so.
I finally managed to delete all of the files (it took the better part
of a day), but the system is still sluggish - even a simple ls command
takes 10 seconds or more to respond.

Is a directory somehow stretched out of shape if it has an absurdly
high number of files created? If so, what's the best way to recover?
Currently I have the customer creating a new directory and copying
the contents of the old directory into it. Then she can delete the
old directory and rename the new one. We've got our fingers crossed -
the way the system is running it's going to take a long time - but if
it fails, what then? Can fsck clean things up, or is it time for a
full reformat a la Windows? 

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