From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Sep 18 13:39:22 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AE4FF37B446; Tue, 18 Sep 2001 13:39:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.11.4/8.11.4) id f8IKd2h27465; Tue, 18 Sep 2001 15:39:02 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 15:37:42 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: "Dreamtime.net Inc." Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Symbolic Links Message-ID: <20010918153741.B3372@dan.emsphone.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22.1i X-OS: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT X-message-flag: Outlook Error Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [ Followups set to freebsd-questions. This is not an SMP question. ] In the last episode (Sep 18), Dreamtime.net Inc. said: > Does anyone know the limit of how many symbolic links can be in one > directory? For one of our systems, we put a symbolic link in a > directory per each user. We have an install coming that will be fore > one million users. So we need a symbolic link for each one. But > wondering what the the max limit for symbolic links is for one > directory. In the last episode (Sep 18), Dreamtime.net Inc. said: > It seems my question was not too accurate. We need 1 million "soft" > symlinks, all in one directory, owned by only one user. > > To be exact, how many "soft" or "hard" sym.links are allowed in one > directory by FreeBSD 4.2? There is no restriction on hard or soft links per se, as they are just files. On the other hand, having a million files of any type in a single directory is probably not a good idea. If these are homedirs or mail spoolfiles, the usual workaround is to create subdirectories so "abcdefgh" becomes "ab/cdefgh" or "abc/defgh", which is much better wrt directory lookup speed. I wonder if the UFS_DIRHASH code would help here.. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message