I was going to start by saying that the big news about SUSE switching from ReiserFS reminded me of an long unanswered question of mine, but I just learned from this forum that this "news" is no longer the big news about Reiser... pretty sad...

Anyway, my question is this: some time back I saw a nice review comparing ReiserFS with ext3 which mentioned that unlike ReiserFS, ext3 has some limit on the number of files which can be kept in one directory, but didn't say what it was! Does anyone know? I hope I am nowhere the alleged upper limit but I'd like to know what it is.

I have a few thousand smallish files which it is convenient to keep in one directory.

I have not seen a reference to any such thing. On one of our linux servers we have a directory with over 20000 records.