[Asterisk-Users] New sounds also now in CVS

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 19 January 2004 13:37, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> > This is actually a bad idea.  While many filesystems today have
> > binary tree directory structures, some still do not.  Allowing
> > too many miscellaneous sounds in a single directory is not only
> > difficult to browse, it may also consume inordinate amounts of
> > CPU, memory, and user time attempting to process the directory
> > structure.
>
> I agree, but I would have figured that any modern OS would have
> cached, hashed and otherwise unfolded the directory structure into
> something ridiculously easy to access after the first read and
> parse.

Although the OS may cache that information, the userland process
can take quite some time to process a very full directory.  I've had
this happen quite a few times with Linux ext2 filesystems, where the
fileglob * exceeded bash's limit of 32,768 characters.  /bin/ls on
those directories took several minutes before the first results were
given.

I'll additionally comment that the directories I was working with were
not normally that full, but was a side effect of a process dumping
lots of little files into a directory when something went wrong.

On a slight tangent, NT4 had a practical limit of about 300 directory
entries before attempting to process the directory became unbearably
slow.

-Tilghman