Million articles in a single directory

[Russ Allbery]

Maarten Thibaut <mthibaut at cisco.com> writes:

> We have up to a million articles in some news groups. As they're all
> stored in a single directory, our file system is grounding to a halt.
> We would like to use some kind of mechanism whereby the different files
> are stored in a tree structure, maybe like this:
>
> First level: 256 dirs named dir.00 to dir.ff. Second level: each dir  has
> 256 dirs each named dir.00 to dir.ff. Each of those contains the  actual
> news articles. You then use a hash function to generate the  name of the
> file.

Yup, it's called timehash.  :)  See storage.conf(5).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.