distributed mailing list? (Was Re: [SunRescue] Question...)

[Graham Hughes]

>>>>> "Joshua" == Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> writes:

    >> Maildir format does this as well.

    Joshua> Do you happen to know how it overcomes the file system
    Joshua> problems with thousands of little files?

It doesn't.

Realistically I ran MH (which does the same thing as maildir but
requires locking) on my personal machine and I've never been in danger
of running out of inodes.  We run maildir on the mail server at work
and it works fine, with lots of users storing lots and lots of mail.
News servers, now there's a situation where you want a whole separate
disk for the spool; INN stores posts in one file apiece and a news
server with a public feed of course deals in massive numbers of posts.

The stuff where reiserfs really comes into its own is where you're
storing 6 bytes of data in 1300 files; block style filesystems will
just bloat each of the files up.  But with all the various headers in
a mail message, this isn't really such a big deal any more, and
maildir is a big win in other respects.
-- 
Graham Hughes <ghughes at lynda.com>
(defun whee (n e) (subseq (let ((c (cons e e))) (nconc c c)) 0 n))