[Mailman-Developers] [ mailman-Bugs-558988 ] bad performance for big queue dirs

[Nigel Metheringham]

> Many filesystems (e.g. the popular ext2) have horrible
> performance when there are many files in the same
> directory.  The queue system should be modified to
> avoid this situation.  As a test case, try adding
> 20,000 test address in such a way that Mailman will try
> to send a welcome message to each of them.

Isn't this optomising for a rather uncommon case.  Typically the qfiles
directory holds a couple of minutes of transactions plus messages
awaiting moderation.  [Actually that comment is somewhat Mailman 2.0.x
centric although I think it will hold for later versions]

> Don't MTAs have the same problem?  Do they all implement
> multiple subdirectories for queued messages?

It is done in some MTAs - exim for example (as an option) - frankly for
many cases the additional overhead of searching n directories outweighs
the advantages of faster per message access *unless* you typically run
huge queues (in which case there are other advantages like splitting the
queue run).

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]