Subj : Max. number of messages....
To   : Mike Bourne
From : Bob Jones
Date : Sat Aug 09 2003 09:49 pm

 MB> I have a Squish question that I have not been able to 
 MB> find the answer for in the documents.
 ...
 MB> The question I have is:  With Squish and a *.msg 
 MB> message base, is there a maximum message number that 
 MB> can be handled?  Back in "the old days" I would use the 
 MB> renumbering feature of CONFMAIL to renumber the 
 MB> messages periodically to keep the ranges more 
 MB> reasonable.

It depends on your OS, the binary you are running, the type of message base you 
have and how you have formated the disk partition you store the messages on.
    
 MB> And I am using *.msg format because I have become 
 MB> rather comfortable with them over the last 15 years or 
 MB> more of being a point, and why change a known good 
 MB> thing?  :-)

Since you are using *.msg, I believe your limits will come from the partition 
you are using for the message base.  If I remember correctly, there is a 
maximum of about 512 files in the root directory of a FAT partition.  Since 
there is one file per message in *.msg format, that gives you an idea of the 
limit.  Since subdirectories on a FAT partition are not as limited to the space 
taken up by the directory contents, subdirectories on FAT partitions can have 
significantly more files....  But too many files will hit access speed  issues. 
 I'm not sure what the limits are on HPFS and NTFS paritions, but I expect 
those are relatively high.

For Max itself, (if using the BBS code to read the areas), there may be a 32K 
limit in that code (due to access via a message number).  Maybe the limit is 
64K.  Maybe the limit is 4Gb....  I haven't looked at the code to see.

As to squish message bases, running under OS/2, with the sq386p version of the 
code, I think I've had areas with over 20K messages in them.  There is a point 
at which some of the related tools will break (such as the squish tools used to 
fix broken databases).  And I have had squish process squish style message 
bases that the squish tools (under OS/2) couldn't handle due to number of 
messages.  I think the limit is around 10K to 16K messages under regular DOS.  
I don't think I took any message bases above about 5K messages when running the 
DOS (16 bit) version of the squish code....                                

For dupe file checking, from memory, just over 3K was the limit of what is 
handled by the dupe checker, so make sure you don't toss old message back out 
of your system on a rescan....  

 MB> I guess that I could get the SQUISH source and check it 
 MB> out myself, but with only most weekends and about every 
 MB> third or fourth workweek in town, that might take a while.

 MB> Thanks for whatever assistance can be supplied.

 MB> Mike Bourne

Take care.....

Bob Jones, 1:343/41


--- Maximus/UNIX 3.03b
 * Origin: Top Hat BBS -- Linux Alpha Setup (1:343/40)

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