FAT32 and maximal number of files per directory

While there are documented Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP, I keep on stumbling on another one: maximal number of files per directory. Video archives are large and by design are kept in single directory. While NTFS is recommended, FAT32 is still used on a number of systems, more often on small scale ones, and the bad news is that FAT32 is often met on network-attached storage (NAS) devices, which are often of large capacity.

So, once we have 21844 (0x5554) files in the directory (it may appear though that the limit is dependent on FAT cluster size), an attempt to create new file will cause a lock inside API call boosting thread’s CPU consumption to 100%. An annoying issue to keep in mind.