What is the limitation in AIX? Post: 302804009

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Operating Systems AIX What is the limitation in AIX? Post 302804009 by bakunin on Tuesday 7th of May 2013 11:55:12 PM

05-08-2013

Registered User

What DGPickett means is the following:

A directory is quite similar to a file and the bigger a file gets the longer it takes the system to read it, which is to be expected. Run a "grep" against a file of 10GB and it will take longer than against a file of 1k size.

Let us consider the case where you issue a command

Code:

grep regexp /path/to/some/file

What happens? Before "grep" can start its work the operating system has to find out which file to open. So it looks in the directory "/path/to/some" and searches there for the inode of "file". A "directory" now is nothing else than a (quite unsorted) list of file names and inode-numbers. The longer this list is the longer it will take the take the OS to search it and find the inode it is interested in.

Usually you won't notice even this difference because the OS uses otherwise unused parts of the memory to buffer such information. This is part of the "file system cache": the system won't read the directory information from disk, but use the copy it has already stored in memory. As memory is much faster than disk this will speed up things considerably. But as the directory gets bigger and bigger and memory is a limited resource at some point the list might not fit in memory any more additionally hurting the speed with which this list is searched.

Bottom line: even if there are no theoretical limits there is some practical limit to directory sizes. This practical limit is pushed as hardware gets faster and memory keeps getting bigger, disks getting faster, etc.., but it still remains.

To split a large directory there is no "standard tool" like there is "split" for files. Just create new directories and use "mv" to move files from one to the other. A command like

Code:

mv /path/to/file /other/path

will physically move a file only of the directories "/path/to" and "/other/path" are not part of the same filesystem. If they are it is simply a matter of removing the directory information from the one list and putting it into the other. It will take the same time regardless of file size, because the file itself is not touched, just "file metadata" - information about files instead of files themselves.

I hope this clears things up.

bakunin

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xgetfontpath

XSetFontPath(3X11)						     MIT X11R4							XSetFontPath(3X11)

Name
       XSetFontPath, XGetFontPath, XFreeFontPath - set, get, or free the font search path

Syntax
       XSetFontPath(display, directories, ndirs)
	  Display *display;
	  char **directories;
	  int ndirs;

       char **XGetFontPath(display, npaths_return)
	  Display *display;
	  int *npaths_return;

       XFreeFontPath(list)
	  char **list;

Arguments
       directories
		 Specifies the directory path used to look for a font.	Setting the path to the empty list restores the default path defined for
		 the X server.

       display	 Specifies the connection to the X server.

       list	 Specifies the array of strings you want to free.

       ndirs	 Specifies the number of directories in the path.

       npaths_return
		 Returns the number of strings in the font path array.

Description
       The function defines the directory search path for font lookup.	There is only one search path per X server, not one per client.  The
       interpretation of the strings is operating system dependent, but they are intended to specify directories to be searched in the order
       listed.	Also, the contents of these strings are operating system dependent and are not intended to be used by client applications.  Usu-
       ally, the X server is free to cache font information internally rather than having to read fonts from files.  In addition, the X server is
       guaranteed to flush all cached information about fonts for which there currently are no explicit resource IDs allocated.  The meaning of an
       error from this request is operating system dependent.

       can generate a error.

       The function allocates and returns an array of strings containing the search path.  When it is no longer needed, the data in the font path
       should be freed by using

       The function frees the data allocated by

Diagnostics
       Some numeric value falls outside the range of values accepted by the request.
		 Unless a specific range is specified for an argument, the full range defined by the argument's type is accepted. Any argument
		 defined as a set of alternatives can generate this error.

See Also
       XListFont(3X11), XLoadFonts(3X11)
       X Window System: The Complete Reference, Second Edition, Robert W. Scheifler and James Gettys

																XSetFontPath(3X11)

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