On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:51:01 EST, Bill Verity said:
> We have several lists with very large archives -- over 400meg and/or
> over 10 years worth of mail.  When anything happens to these lists,
> it obviously strains the server and sometimes we crash.  Would there
> be any advantage to aggregating some previous years into single
> yearly files rather than monthly or weekly files.  There would be
> fewer files, but they would be larger.  It would certainly tidy up
> the various archive web pages.

Back when we were still running 1.8mumble on an AIX box, we had the *opposite*
problem - very large archives would cause the indexer to blow out on memory,
so the solution was to split them up - it could handle 2 100M files in sequence
using less memory than 1 200M file (or whatever it was that caused the kablam).