Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

1719.0. "Shared Directory File Limit" by ODIXIE::HAM () Thu Nov 05 1992 03:24

    ALL-IN-1 V2.4 - VMS V5.3
    
    Customer has been experiencing problems with user's creating mail 
    messages, error writing to the shared directories.  Investigation 
    revealed that the "window" directories contained  700+ files.  Problem 
    solved but customer had a question I wasn't quite sure about.
    
    When an attempt is made to write a file to a shared directory, i.e., 
    user sends a recently created message, how is it determined in which 
    shared directory the file is placed?
    
    Is there a number limit of files in each directory which would prohibit 
    ALL-IN-1 from placing the file in that directory?  I understand 500 is 
    the recommended maximum, but what causes the error writing to a shared 
    directory after a users sends a message.  The max file limit on the 
    disk is well above the actual number of files on the disk.  The 
    avaliable free blocks are well above the recommended 5000.  Also, on 
    occassions, when the error message is received, a subsequent send of 
    the same message is successful, with the message being written to 
    another shared directory.  This generated another question.  In the 
    "round robin" fashion of distributing the messages across the window, 
    based on the preceding sentence, should not ALL-IN-1 check for 
    availability on all directories of the "window" and if unsuccessfull, 
    then error the fact that the file could not be written to disk?
    
    Is there an internal number to ALL-IN-1 that is compared to the actual 
    number of files in a directory to determine whether a file is created 
    in a particular directory?
    
    Thanks...
    
    Bill 

    The files are allocated randomly. Well actually I think it's based on
    the system time, but it's effectively random.
    
    Normally that error occurrs if the disc file header is full, which is
    easy to do on ALL-IN-1 discs, since the defaults don't envisage
    zillions of small files. Or if the disc really gets full. I don't
    believe you can actually overfill a directory, it just becomes less
    efficient.
    
    There aren't any checks about suitability of the window directories to
    add files, it would take too long to do that at run-time. The SM needs
    to keep an eye on that off-line.
    
    Graham