On Thu, 28 Aug 1997, John Henders wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 28/97, Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham@???> wrote:
> >
> > I must admit I find it had to understand why people use lsearch
> > extensively - for a partial search you can be doing a lot of file scans.
> > Personally I have *everything* as dbm files.
>
> Well, I do it mainly because I don't think my files are big enough to
> gain a lot of performance advantages yet.
> At least to start with I would be using ndbm as our platform
> is Solaris.
We do a lot of lsearches on Solaris, and one of the reasons is that we
started out using ndbm "because it was there". Because it uses two files
for each logical DBM file, you can't update the database atomically. We
can't trivially just change to Berkeley db, because the user's vacation
"once" files are already using ndbm. We know the problem won't go away,
but so far we haven't had the willpower to do the uncomfortable change
to a DBM library that uses just a single file.
I did look at the possibility of making Exim support more than one DBM
library simultaneously, but recoiled in horror at the problems I thought
would arise.
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
