MB> I have a Squish question that I have not been able to 
 MB> find the answer for in the documents.
 ...
 MB> The question I have is:  With Squish and a *.msg 
 MB> message base, is there a maximum message number that 
 MB> can be handled?  Back in "the old days" I would use the 
 MB> renumbering feature of CONFMAIL to renumber the 
 MB> messages periodically to keep the ranges more 
 MB> reasonable.

It depends on your OS, the binary you are running, the type of message base
you have and how you have formated the disk partition you store the
messages on.
    
 MB> And I am using *.msg format because I have become 
 MB> rather comfortable with them over the last 15 years or 
 MB> more of being a point, and why change a known good 
 MB> thing?  :-)

Since you are using *.msg, I believe your limits will come from the
partition you are using for the message base.  If I remember correctly,
there is a maximum of about 512 files in the root directory of a FAT
partition.  Since there is one file per message in *.msg format, that gives
you an idea of the limit.  Since subdirectories on a FAT partition are not
as limited to the space taken up by the directory contents, subdirectories
on FAT partitions can have significantly more files....  But too many files
will hit access speed  issues.  I'm not sure what the limits are on HPFS
and NTFS paritions, but I expect those are relatively high.

For Max itself, (if using the BBS code to read the areas), there may be a
32K limit in that code (due to access via a message number).  Maybe the
limit is 64K.  Maybe the limit is 4Gb....  I haven't looked at the code to
see.

As to squish message bases, running under OS/2, with the sq386p version of
the code, I think I've had areas with over 20K messages in them.  There is
a point at which some of the related tools will break (such as the squish
tools used to fix broken databases).  And I have had squish process squish
style message bases that the squish tools (under OS/2) couldn't handle due
to number of messages.  I think the limit is around 10K to 16K messages
under regular DOS.  I don't think I took any message bases above about 5K
messages when running the DOS (16 bit) version of the squish code....      
                         

For dupe file checking, from memory, just over 3K was the limit of what is
handled by the dupe checker, so make sure you don't toss old message back
out of your system on a rescan....  

 MB> I guess that I could get the SQUISH source and check it 
 MB> out myself, but with only most weekends and about every 
 MB> third or fourth workweek in town, that might take a while.

 MB> Thanks for whatever assistance can be supplied.

 MB> Mike Bourne

Take care.....

Bob Jones, 1:343/41


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