too many files in a directory

[David Lang]

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010, Ross Boylan wrote:

> Thanks for your reply.
> On 11/5/2010 6:18 PM, David Lang wrote:
>>> I have a narrow question and a broader one.  Narrowly, if I create some
>>> other folders and move some of the messages into them, will it help?  My
>>> understanding is that cyrus tries to avoid copying or moving message
>>> files around on disk, and so I suspect the files will continue to take
>>> up space in the original directory even if I move them.
>> 
>> if you copy them to the new folder, 
> are you talking about a filesystem copy, or a copy via imap?

copy via imap. you really don't want to go mucking around on the filesystem 
under cyrus. Reserv that for emergancies ;-)

>> delete them from the old folder, and expunge them, then the directory slots 
>> will be freed up. I don't think that ext3 will actually shrink the 
>> directory, but it will re-use these available slots for new files. 
>
> [deleted stuff on XFS]
> Yes, I noticed XFS seems to have quite a few people with good experiences. 
> That's another one I might consider.  I was a little reluctant because I've 
> also seen (not in this list) people saying it ate their data.  Of course, a 
> lot of people said that about reiserfs too, and probably every other file 
> system...

the other thing to look at is _when_it ate their data. like linux, most 
filesystems are under continuing development. If XFS ate their data 5+ years 
ago, so many improvements have gone in thatI wouldn't care. If they say it ate 
their data last year, I would be worried.

David Lang