John Henders writes:
>
> Better still to deliver the mail to the user's home directory and avoid
> _all_ the problems of a common mail spool. Ever done an ls -l on
> /var/spool/mail with 10000 user mailboxes in it? How many coffees did you
> brew while you waited for it to complete.
This is getting off-topic, but "ls -ln" is likely to be a lot faster (if
your ls supports -n, i.e. is SysV not bsd derived). That is, it's the
passwd lookups for 10000 different users that is killing you, not just
the 10000 stat(2)'s.
The efficiency of access to single files in very large directories tends
to be getting better in modern systems. Both Solaris 2 and the Network
Appliance fileserver seem to have coped OK with our 6000+ entry /var/mail
on cus.cam.ac.uk.
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1@???
