Overview Buffers just keep on growing...

[Kai Henningsen]

rra at stanford.edu (Russ Allbery)  wrote on 22.01.03 in <ylsmvl8167.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>:

> Jeffrey M Vinocur <jeff at litech.org> writes:
>
> > I don't think that's your problem.  I think a fair number of people keep
> > their local hierarchies on infinite retention without much problem.
> > (Although Russ switched from tradspool to timehash for the largest
> > group, as I recall, to avoid too many files in one directory.)
>
> Note that this was in part due to Solaris UFS issues.  Solaris has serious
> problems with performance in directories with more than 20,000 files in
> them.  If I were using ext2 or XFS, I probably wouldn't have bothered
> switching.

ext2 has the same kind of problem. That's the reason I have a cronjob  
removing the whole control.cancel directory regularly - it slowed both INN  
(1.7something) and updatedb (find) to a crawl before (especially updatedb  
spent sonething like twenty minutes or more crawling through that  
directory).

There are some patches to ext2 for directory indexing that are supposed to  
cure this, but they're not in Linux 2.4 AFAIK. No idea if they'll be in  
2.6.

MfG Kai