13 Jun 08 16:20, Mark Lewis wrote to Roy Witt:

 RW>>>> Great...I have one echo that doesn't seem to be.
 ML>>> which one is that?? maybe i can check its activity from here?
 RW>> It was Fidonews. It's working again. FastEcho seems to have a limit
 RW>> of how many messages can be in one folder. I don't purge that echo,
 RW>> but keep old messages for posterity. Under the FIDONEWS directory, I
 RW>> have archives by the year in sub-directories, going back to 2002,
 RW>> when Bjorn became editor. Anyway, I had to renumber and then move
 RW>> messages from the FIDONEWS folder to 2005, 2006 and 2007
 RW>> sub-directories, yesterday.

 ML> ahhh... are you running MSG (aka SDM) format for that area??

Yeup.

 ML>  what was the highest message number before you did all your moving
 ML> and archiving?

I don't remember.

 ML> what OS and drive format are you using, too?

W2K and NTFS.

 ML> i know that the combination of DOS and FAT-16 (the old standard
 ML> stuff) had a limitation of 255 per directory or some such... actually
 ML> not a limitation but once that boundary was hit, things slowed down
 ML> tremendously...

I noticed that the tossing had slowed down quite a bit in the days before
this occured. I thought it was time to do some HD maintenance, but that
particular drive didn't need defraging. I did it anyway and found that it
made no difference.

 ML>  we, the RemoteAccess BBS guys, ran into it when we released RA with
 ML> JAM support... it didn't take long for folk to pop up in the support
 ML> echo whining and crying "JAM is so slow" and generally
decrying it in
 ML> toto... once we were able to pull the details from them, we
 ML> discovered that all of them with this problem had a lot of areas
 ML> defined to be stored in the same directory...

Sounds familiar.

 ML> IIRC, the first guy with this complaint had over a 1000 areas defined
 ML> and all stored in one directory... that's 4000 individual files! once
 ML> we figured out what the problem was and got him to split his areas so
 ML> that there were no more than 60 or so (63 max) per directory, he
 ML> reported, quite happily, i might add, that he saw a 100 fold (at
 ML> least) speedup in his system :)

After cleaning up that folder's archive, I see the old speed come back to
tossing mail. 10 to 30 packets at a time in mere seconds.

 RW>> I need to create a message that pops up on January 1st that tells me
 RW>> it's time to archive again.

 ML> use an autoposting tool and send yourself a netmail... quite easy to
 ML> do if one is running 4DOS (for the date functions) and something like
 ML> my PostIt utility :)  IIRC, FE also has the ability to post text
 ML> files to messages but it has been a long long while since i've used
 ML> it...

I used it (feutil post) on a daily basis when I had a link to FN_SYSOP.
and that's how the rules to these echoes are posted.

                R\%/itt



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