Internal Directory Structure Changes in 3.8.x

As a consequence of the internal directory structure of former releases the performance of file accesses was not performant when using e.g ten thousand ILIAS file objects.

To improve the performance of huge file directories a new directory structure will be build in the database update steps.
Building this structure may be quite time consuming. If your database update stops (e.g due to PHP max execution time settings), simply restart the database migration.

After finishing the database migration there are new directories ('ilCourses', 'ilFiles') in your External Data Directory (you find the path in 'Setup -> Paths -> Path to Data Directory').
The old directories ('course' and 'files') should not contain any content.