Hello mark!

09 Jun 18 13:57, mark lewis wrote to Gerrit Kuehn:

 GK>> "a few minutes" is exactly what I would call
"for ages".

 ml> wow, really??

For mails, definitely.
On other occasions we had data distributed into many files that needed to
be processed... at one point it became completely unmanagable to keep all
files in one directory because everything was slowing down. We solved this
in a rather simple way and put files into subdirectories depending on the
crc8 checksum of their name. This divided the number of files per directory
by 256 (on average), and everything was smooth again.

 ml> the above was after a fresh boot... the file cache was relatively 
 ml> empty... a second search returned within seconds... possibly up to 30 
 ml> seconds depending on the search...

As I said: if you have 50k files, 100k files or even more, and need to
process them all, these delays sum up every time you access one file. A
simple "ls -l" will give you the creeps. Shell scripts break at
various points due to "argument list too long" or similar errors.
Depending on the filesystem you use, there may be other dragons hiding.
The situation is easy enough to avoid, so why asking for trouble?


Regards,
Gerrit

...  9:05PM  up 153 days, 22:58, 9 users, load averages: 0.17, 0.12, 0.09

--- Msged/BSD 6.1.2