Performance with deep structure

[garygreen]

At the moment the default directory size is 5 - this creates extremely deep structure that puts a huge strain on the disk when it comes to seeks and writes. Doing a du in a large directory - good luck with that, command took over 3 hours. Cleaning up old files - again, good luck with that.

Could we have more options when it comes to defining the structure of the directories?

For instance, I would like to have only one level deep with alpha characters (a-z) 2 characters in length so:

cache/aa/<hash>.jpg
cache/ab/<hash>.jpg
cache/ac/<hash>.jpg
etc

This will allow for 676 directories one level-deep with say an average target of 3000-5000 files per folder giving an allowance of over 2 million images with minimal seeks / performance issues.