Documents per folder best practices

[zulu]

Hi everyone,

Are there any rules of thumb around the maximum documents a folder should contain before creating another folder?  Previous DM systems I've used have seen major performance degradation once there were more than about 500 documents in a folder.

Basically looking for advice on how best to structure and manage the import of potentially millions of documents into an Alfresco repository.  My customer essentially lives in the search and uses the folder hierarchy as little as possible due to the sheer quantity of documents in the system.

Thanks in advance!

Chuck

[mrogers]

It shouldn't matter on the newer versions of alfresco since the problem areas should be paged.

500 is a good rule of thumb with Alfresco as well.   At some time you may want to use an access method other than search?

[yuhuayang]

Hi

I am just setting up the folder structure in Alfresco for my employer. We anticipate thousands of documents per folder if we don't do anything creative other than 26 folders from A-Z.

Judging from this thread, if there was more than 500 documents per folder, what will happen? Would the application load slowly when a user opens that folder?

what would be the ideal folder structures?

Thanks

[framt]

Hello,

I have a similar question. My Company is moving over to Alfresco and we currently use a large folder system to store the several 100 documents that enter the system a day. As we scale up we expect our document inflow to scale up as well.

Has anyone encountered issues storing more than 1000 documents in a folder? Have there been any large latency delays?

Thank you!!

[zulu]

Thanks for the quick response.

I have given some thought to other options than search.  Most of the problems come from a document not belonging 'cleanly' to a given area in the current folder structure (which was admittedly put together poorly), or else needing to be in multiple areas.  Multi-filing might work, but I like the idea of tags more.  I suppose I'm influenced by google mail where I find things by either searching or looking through specific tags or combinations thereof - hierarchy location unknown and to me irrelevant.  Security as tags change is a question I asked earlier and I'm satisfied I can trigger the correct application of ACLs.  Whether it's a good idea to do so, I've not convinced myself yet.

I'm leaning towards a structure where new documents get autofiled in some random folder (perhaps based on the hash as I saw somewhere else on these forums) where the folder permissions are wide-open but the document permissions are locked down per user desires.  Users that can see the document can then apply further tags to it, some of which may open that document's permissions to some extent.  Groups would do the same thing and be simpler, but I want the group list to be static and admin-controlled whereas the tags to be dynamic, user-controlled and useable in filters/searches.

Still new to this and trying to break out of my old DM mindset, and I appreciate the advice.

Chuck