>> On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:38:44 -0700 (PDT),
>> Troy Morrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
T> We have a fairly ongoing problem with some of the users at work who
T> don't seem capable of cleaning out their INBOX, so they end up with
T> 100MB mail spools with 7000 messages in them.
T> I had theorized that chunking over the 100MB mailbox was slow, and that
T> using a maildir would be much faster, and it is except that with that
T> many messages, the OS slows down.
That's a political problem rather than a technical one; a faster
filesystem won't help because a bigger INBOX will put you back where you
were.
We ran into this several years ago when we started using NFS drives to
share files on a 380-user intranet. The drives would fill, we'd nag
people to clean their stuff up, and a day later they'd be full again.
The only fix was to put all files older than (say) 6 months into a
compressed archive elsewhere.
If someone misses the file, they call and ask for it to be restored.
Since it's sitting in a compressed archive, it's lots faster than
getting a file back from tape.
If a few people from the same division complain, my boss gets together
with their boss and says, "For X dollars we'll buy Y Gbytes of space for
your use only, it's automatically backed up for you every night, and YOU
decide what to do when it fills up."
--
Karl Vogel
ASC/YCOA, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH 45433, USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid
moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads
wondering if we might possibly have missed something.
--Gamel Abdel Nasser