[Mailman-Developers] Having more than 16,000 lists

[Marc MERLIN]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 10:43:54PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>     MM> Just for the record, Sourceforge just hit the 16,000 lists
>     MM> limit today and broke because ext2fs doesn't support more than
>     MM> 32,000 links to a directory (archives/private had 32,000
>     MM> archive dirs) I'm told freebsd's UFS has similar problems.
> 
> Wow, neat!  Not for you, but neat. :)
 
BTW, I ended up removing all the HTML archive directories since I've turned
off HTML archiving anyway.
That gives  us a little  while (more  than six months  if we are  lucky :-D)
before we hit the 32,000 lists mark.

I'm thinking  about an optional  modification to mailman which  only affects
list  creation that  creates  the mailman/foo/l/li/listname  dirs, and  then
symlinks all this to mailman/foo/listname
Yeah, symlinks aren't great, but the advantage is that it requires no other
changes to the mailman code

>     MM> Of course, that can be fixed with Residerfs/XFS/name your FS
>     MM> here or archives/private/l/li/listname{,.mbox} but my point
>     MM> was that if you create a directory for each attachment, you're
>     MM> going to hit the 32,000 limit very quickly.
> 
> Ah, so /that's/ why we have /home/groups/m/ma/mailman... :)
 
Yep :-)
(it's also to allow for splitting  over more file servers and partitions and
dealing with amanda  (backup software) very unfortunate  limitation of being
unable to backup more than a tape's worth of data per partition)
 
>     MM> As far as I know, most FS don't handle hundreds of thousands
>     MM> of files in the same dir very well, but at least they handle
>     MM> it.
> 
> Don't worry, we're not talking about a directory for each attachment,
> but a directory for each message with an attachment.  Hmm, maybe we
> /should/ worry!  32k messages with attachments sure doesn't seem all
> that many.

We'd hit that pretty quickly on SF.net :-)

Marc
-- 
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
  
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