I am wanting to make a website that has a login/registration system that has a folder named "users" in the main directory that holds all of the XML files generated by the registration page. All of the user's data will be stored in their own separate XML file, their username being the name of the file. As i have heard all over the internet, using this method could potentially get really laggy, as the server will have to search through hundreds to thousands of filed depending on the size of your website. I know that using a database would completely solve the lag problem, but I really don't want to use one for this project. So I came up with a solution, and I'm just wondering if this would work, as once I launch the site, it will be a HUGE pain in the butt to change the method of user data storage. I want to know if it would work to add sub-directories to my users folder to hold the data alphabetically. Like: The folder named "M" would contain all the user XML files with the first letter being M. So, instead of trying to find a user in a huge list of XML files, it would search through a WAY smaller list. I was wondering if this would make it less laggy. Thanks.
That's a kind of primitive index, and it might help, for a while. You might consider using an XML database like eXist which will have a much more capable indexing engine.