On Tue, 27 Mar 2001 18:47:51 +0700, Erry Rahmawan <[log in to unmask]>
said:

> I wanna ask about limitation in archiving list ? Based on our
> experience, filesystem in Unix cannot bigger than 32K files in one
> directory.

Well, some Unix variants have this restriction.  However, even those that have
no real limit start showing performance issues with more than 3K or so files
in a single directory.

> Listserv store archive file & file index of archive in one directory, so I think there must some limitation for that, especially for
> maximum number of archive. Is it true ?

Yes, but traditionally, the mailing list archives are kept on a per-week or
per-month basis.  On a per-week basis, the list would have to have been
started in the year 1386, and with monthly notebooks, in 668 BC, before you
would have gotten to 32K files.

> And if it is true, is there any solution to break-up the limitation ???

Don't use 'Notebook=Separate'.  Use single, yearly, monthly, or weekly
instead.

Use a separate directory for each list.  For instance, we have:

for sas-l:  notebook = yes,/home/listserv/notebooks/sas-l,weekly
for spd-l:  notebook = yes,/home/listserv/notebooks/spd-l,monthly
for inter-l:  notebook = yes,/home/listserv/notebooks/inter-l,weekly

Alternatively, go through and delete old/un-needed archives on a regular
basis.

We have some 4,100+ lists on my server (LSoft lists it as #2 in the
world for number of lists), of which 2,887 have notebooks totalling
30,500 files and 3.6G of disk space used.  Of those, the *maximum*
number of files in one directory is 356.  Another directory has 259,
and 5 lists have between 100 and 150 files.

If one of the largest Listserv sites in the world hasn't hit 32K files
for *all* its notebooks put together, I don't think you need to worry about
hitting the limit on a per-notebook basis...

--
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Operating Systems Analyst
                                Virginia Tech