Edward Henigin wrote:
I wanna talk this out.
What do you mean about "100,000 files in a directory will cause you performance problems"?
I was told by Network Appliance that their WAFFLE filesystem (or whatever) hashes the directory entries internally, so there are *no* scaling issues with regards to directories with many entries in them.
Are you wrong? Or is Network Appliances wrong?
Dunno. :-) However, I have noticed problems with large directories on our system, which was causing very poor performance. One person mentioned that it might have been my use of nfsv3, instead of v2, which alledgedly has a slower "readdir" call...
In any event, it turned out to be a Solaris bug, filling the directories with thousands of .nfsxxxx turds, which was solved by the appropriate patch...
Ed Henigin ed@texas.net
ps just what the heck do you mean by 'setting up a directory hashing scheme' ? Are you talking about the MTA and/or POP3 servers having their own databases of filename->inode mappings? Your terminoligy seems vague, maybe that's where my confusion stems.
Sorry, I mean setting up the MTA, so that instead of having:
/var/spool/mail/luser
as the mailbox, you have:
/var/spool/mail/l/u/luser
Which keeps the directories small. You need to arrange for the users to have their mail drops set up this way. If they never log in, the easiest thing to do is to set their home directories to be that dir, and then deliver mail to their home directory. Again, easy with qmail.
-Dom