Wes Garland wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 RJT> I've heard it said elsewhere that *.msg should be a whole lot less 
 RJT> of a problem for unix-type platforms than it was 
 RJT> elsewhere,  though I can't recall the reason given 
 RJT> at the moment.  I know that back when I was 
 RJT> programming this sort of thing under CP/M and 
 RJT> early on in DOS,  that was a sequential search and 
 RJT> could take a lot of time.

 WG> That's true, although it depends a lot on the UNIX variant and the
 WG> filesystem employed.

I can see where that would be the case.

 WG> Stock SVR4 UNIX running UFS (UNIX File System) has problems with
 WG> directories having more than 32,768 entries, for example.

Heh.  I can think of only one example where things here even began to come
that close to such a situation...

I forget what it is,  but *something* I do here manages to clobber the
settings for a squish base.  Probably when one gets corrupted due to a
glitch and I have to run SQFIX,  or similar.  Anyhow,  I noticed this one
echo had hit a 5-digit number!  One that I don't normally read,  one of the
win* ones.  I fixed the problem (all the "settings" were at zero)
and the size went away shortly thereafter.

Funny thing,  but this would have been a real problem for me not all that
long ago.  I was running *two* partitions for messages,  now since cut back
to one, and I would've run out of disk space before it had gotten that far.
 Not a problem these days,  unfortunately.  I'm looking at about a third of
the drive empty space,  and that's after having combined two message
partitions with the one I used for "transient" stuff (inbound, 
outbound,  etc.) as well.

 WG> On a Sun Ultra Enterprise 150 (Ultra 1 in a fancy box), I have 
 WG> clocked the creation of files above this limit to take nearly a 
 WG> real second. This was running Solaris 2.5.1 (quite old), but I 
 WG> believe the problem is still there (but not as bad) in Solaris 
 WG> 2.8. Installing the Veritas Filesystem (VxFS) solves this problem, 
 WG> as it is an extent-based allocator, but the license for that can 
 WG> run in the thousands of dollars per machine.

Ouch.

 WG> I have no clue about Linux, though (I'm a UNIX programmer, only use
 WG> Linux on a hobby basis and for firewalls).

I guess it would depend on the filesystem that's being used at least to some extent.

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