Re: opening speed for nnml groups

[Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@mjolner.dk>]

Steve Folkes <smf@rivers.dra.hmg.gb> writes:
> It may be in the Unix filesystem itself.  I had a problem
> with our newsfeed a few years ago that put about 10,000
> files in one directory; it took over a week to remove them
> all (using "rm -rf").

What Unix would that be?

% mkdir test
% perl -e 'foreach $a (1..10000) { open FOO, ">test/$a" }'
% time rm -rf test
0.60u 11.18s 1:55.40 10.2%
% uname -a
SunOS heimdal 5.5.1 Generic_103640-08 sun4u sparc

> Some of the NNML groups that I use for mailing lists have
> become quite large (over 1,000 messages) and have started to
> slow down.  They are also slow when I use "ls" on the
> directory that stores them though.

ls is primarily slow because it has to sort the files.

But of course, the Unix filesystem gets slower as more files are in a
directory, but it's not _that_ bad.
-- 
Lars Balker Rasmussen, Software Engineer, Mjolner Informatics ApS
lbr@mjolner.dk