Storing 64000+ files and growing in one folder (ext3)

It will work. You may not want to run any batch operations on the directory's contents. ls and such will drag. I tend to use XFS filesystems for directories that have a large number of files that aren't stored in a tree...

For instance...

# mount
/dev/sdb1 on /app type xfs (rw,noatime,logbufs=8,logbsize=256k,nobarrier)

[root@Rizzo /app/prt]# ls -1 | wc -l
191487

[root@Rizzo /app/prt]# time du -skh .
27G     .

real    0m0.834s
user    0m0.236s
sys     0m0.566s

[root@Rizzo /app/prt]# time ls -lrta | tail -8
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PAB      PAB             733 Dec 15 11:48 09228885.TGZ
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD            8250 Dec 15 11:48 09228881.TGZ
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD            9803 Dec 15 11:48 09228881.LAY.TGZ
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD          127973 Dec 15 11:49 09228886.LAY
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD           31720 Dec 15 11:49 09228886.PRT
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD            5368 Dec 15 11:49 09228886.POF
drwxrwxrwx  3 PEB      SJS         5066752 Dec 15 11:49 .
-rw-rw-rw-  1 PJD      PJD           31726 Dec 15 11:49 09228886.TMP

real    0m2.673s
user    0m1.055s
sys     0m1.622s