We have a Linux server process that writes a few thousand files to a directory, deletes the files, and then writes a few thousand more files to the same directory without deleting the directory. What I'm starting to see is that the process doing the writing is getting slower and slower.

My question is this: The directory size of the folder has grown from 4096 to over 200000 as see by this output of ls -l.

root@ad57rs0b# ls -l 15000PN5AIA3I6_B total 232 drwxr-xr-x 2 chef chef 233472 May 30 21:35 barcodes

On ext3, can these large directory sizes slow down performance?

Thanks.

Aaron