How many files can I put in a directory?

Question

Does it matter how many files I keep in a single directory? If so, how many files in a directory is too many, and what are the impacts of having too many files? (This is on

Answer 1

For what it's worth, I just created a directory on an ext4 file system with 1,000,000 files in it, then randomly accessed those files through a web server. I didn't notice any premium on accessing those over (say) only having 10 files there.

This is radically different from my experience doing this on ntfs a few years back.