Well, unfortunately, that was an intentional Sleuthkit change... I'll search for the related issue and post it here.

sleuthkit/sleuthkit#2787

I agree with those stating it should at least be configurable, e.g. with an environment variable parameter.

We can patch our Sleuthkit fork to implement that, I'm not happy to maintain a fork...

@wladimirleite, while running your tests, did you see big memory consumption issues or excessive slowness?

@wladimirleite, while running your tests, did you see big memory consumption issues or excessive slowness?

Using 4.11.1, tsk_loaddb.exe took a while (~40 minutes), but I didn't monitor memory.
With IPED processing (and tsk_loaddb.exe 4.12.0), it was very fast (only a minute or so), but the folder and all its files were ignored.

I agree with those stating it should at least be configurable, e.g. with an environment variable parameter.

Indeed. And maybe an option to abort with an error, instead of just silently ignoring.

We can patch our Sleuthkit fork to implement that, I'm not happy to maintain a fork...

I don't think it is worth the effort to maintain a fork.
Since @hugohmk provided a E01 with a folder with 3 million files, I will try to raise the hardcoded limit in TSK and see what happens in terms of memory consumption and slowness.
As I said, this should be very rare, but once we try to process a disk image with such a condition, it can be very dangerous, as a lot of files will be ignored without any clear warning.

As I said, this should be very rare, but once we try to process a disk image with such a condition, it can be very dangerous, as a lot of files will be ignored without any clear warning.

Has tsk_loaddb.exe 4.12+ written some warning/error in the Console? If yes, was that logged in IPED logs? PS: Today we use the java bindings, which output can be different than tsk_loaddb, we try to detect critical errors from TSK java binding output, log some of them and redirect others to IPED console, maybe we are failing in the error detection part...

Using 4.11.1, tsk_loaddb.exe took a while (~40 minutes), but I didn't monitor memory.

Well, I have seen a few cases taking a similar or more time in tsk_loaddb to decode the FS tree, not sure if they are related to this issue...

No output in the console using tsk_loaddb.
I later saw some messages using its verbose command line option, but it generated several GB of log, so it wasn't possible to identify what was going on.

@markmckinnon if we send a PR to Sleuthkit making that hard coded limit configurable, will it be reviewed?

@lfcnassif it should be reviewed and implemented as this can also effect Autopsy as well.

Thanks @markmckinnon, we will try to propose a PR to Sleuthkit repo then.

Do you think using an environment variable, like TSK_MAX_ENTRIES_PER_FOLDER is a good approach? If not set, keep current limit. If set, use the configured value. If set to -1, disable the limit. Looks fine?

So each tool that wants to make a new limit or no limit will have to set an environment variable in what ever OS they are running in instead of using a command line argument?

Yes, that would work for us, and minor code changes would be needed, with no TSK API or internal data structures changes. But I understand that would be a global system configuration that would affect all TSK depending tools, and maybe different tools would need a different configuration...

@wladimirleite did this happen with a real world image or the triggering image was an artificial one?

I confirmed with @hugohmk a while ago, it was in an artificial image (generated to test another unrelated possible performance issue).
I planned to investigate it a bit more, maybe suggesting a better solution inside TSK, but couldn't find time so far, as I am not familiar with its code.

I can implement the environment variable workaround in our fork, but I'm asking to check the priority of this fix, if it should go into 4.2.0 or not, so seems it is not critical...

No, I don't think it is critical.