Re: Using hash directories

[Emmanuel Lacour <elacour@easter-eggs.com>]

On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 10:59:39AM +0200, Volker Tanger wrote:
> 
> Quite a number of filesystems still do linear search when trying to
> access a file. So accessing the mailbox for Zacharias Zulu (zzulu) among
> 20.000 users will give the OS probably 19.998 filenames too look up

--------------------------------snip-------------------------------------



Thanks all for your explanations! I summarize here the benefits of hash
directories I've heard (simple and practical explanation;-)).


- better performances because classical FS (such as ext3 in my case) are
  slower with a big number of entries in a directory.
- easier to scale, because you can easily put some ranges of accounts in
  another partition/disk/server by moving some directories.
- easier to administer, because we don't like waiting when doing "ls";-)


So for my purpose, I will run with a two level hash ([0-9a-z]/[0-9a-z])
for users maildirs, and create them in the ldap based on the uid with
something like this (perl) :

$mailbox = $uid;
$mailbox =~ s/[^a-z^0-9]+//g;
$mailbox =~ s/(.)(.).*/\/home\/vmail\/$1\/$2\/$uid\//;


(this could help someone :-))

-- 
Emmanuel Lacour ------------------------------------ Easter-eggs
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