From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat May 26 2:37:25 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from areilly.bpc-users.org (CPE-144-132-234-126.nsw.bigpond.net.au [144.132.234.126]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D994637B422 for ; Sat, 26 May 2001 02:37:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from areilly@bigpond.net.au) Received: (qmail 2853 invoked by uid 1000); 26 May 2001 09:37:23 -0000 From: "Andrew Reilly" Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:37:23 +1000 To: Terry Lambert Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <20010526193723.B2573@gurney.reilly.home> References: <200105252049.NAA13292@usr06.primenet.com> <20010526192516.A2573@gurney.reilly.home> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010526192516.A2573@gurney.reilly.home>; from areilly@bigpond.net.au on Sat, May 26, 2001 at 07:25:16PM +1000 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 07:25:16PM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote: > One of my personal mail folders has 4400 messages in it, and > I've only been collecting that one for a few years. It's not > millions, but its a few more than the "500" that I've seen some > discuss here as a reasonable limit (why is that reasonable?) and > it's many many more than the 72 or so limit available in ADFS. I realised as soon as I pressed the send button that my current use of large directories for mail files doesn't actually involve any random access: the directory is read sequentially to build the header list. It is quite concievable that a performance tweak to the IMAP server could involve a header cache in a relational database of some sort, and that would certainly contain references to the individual files, which would then be accessed randomly. /usr/ports/distfiles on any of the mirrors probably contains upwards of 5000 files too, and there is a strong likelyhood that these will be accessed out-of-order by ports-makefile-driven fetch requests. -- Andrew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message