Squid-1.0 used 100 first-level directories for each 'cache_dir'. For very large caches, this meant between 5,000-10,000 files per directory, which isn't good for performance on any unix system. As well as the directory search times being slow, the amount of disk traffic due to directory operations was quite large (due to directory fragmentation (variable length filenames) each directory was about 100k in size).