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Subject: Re: Scalability metrics?
From: Andrew McNamara (andrewmconnect.com.au)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2000 - 19:37:27 CST

>> I see other people replied to this already, but yes, there's quite
>> a few UNIXen out there that will handle billions of different UIDs.
>
> I'm sorry. The concept of applying different UIDs to each
>mailbox just makes me wanna hurl.
>
> I've got enough stuff I have to keep track of on these machines
>-- I don't want each and every mail server to have to deal with
>trying to keep it's brains from exploding when dealing with hundreds
>of thousands of UIDs, the search time it takes to look them all up
>and display them when you do an ls, etc....

Our current mail system has unique UID's per user - we have about
100,000 users. It works (and allows us to use the OS's quota system -
how do you implement quotas?). The password file only contains the
usual system accounts and accounts for maintenance staff, so there are
no slow lookups.

I'm not sure this is a design I would repeat, but it does work.

 ---
Andrew McNamara (System Architect)

connect.com.au Pty Ltd
Lvl 3, 213 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia
Phone: +61 2 9409 2117, Fax: +61 2 9409 2111