Switching tile formats on a LiDAR ingestion pipeline cut output object count by roughly 25x at the same data volume, independent of compression. Here is why object count is its own cost and performance axis on object storage, and what to check before you scale a pipeline that writes many small files.
MinIO has no NameNode. It puts the namespace on XFS as real directories and xl.meta files. On Lots of Small Files that means you can exhaust inodes while df -h still looks fine, and a flat leaf can stall PUT, LIST, scanner, and ILM together. Here is the on-disk model, the inode math, and a prefix recipe that keeps XFS inside a regime you can operate.
Two MinIO platforms, same root cause: used as a NoSQL store. Field notes on LIST IOPS, XFS directory limits, scanner & heal SLAs, the erasure-coding storage-efficiency inversion on small objects, and why Apache Cassandra (or Ceph) is the right answer on-prem in 2026.