HP-UX

(Very) early cleardown or archive of your primary directories very important for performance.

Some admins leave it for weeks or months or years before getting around to the cull. At a design level you need to implement data culls or archive processess according to rules from "day one" to prevent unix directories becoming oversize due to laziness in archiving or removing old files.

Serious note: You may need to schedule downtime to backup, re-create & restore key directories in order to maintain performance.

Another often overlooked option is putting the quiescent files in a zip file (with relative paths) and accessing them by something like:

Code:

popen( "unzip -p zipfile.zip target_path/target_file.ext",  "r" )

so no temp raw copies are written (avoid wasted space, bandwidth, latency, cleanup, name collisions). It saves storage space and the files may flow faster out of a CPU unzip than raw off the disk. Some tools can traverse a zip as if it was a directory, and honoring relative paths stored inside the zip. For NFS files, the data traverses the network compresssed, adding speed and conserving bandwidth. Of course, you cannot seek in a compressed file stream fd/FILE*, but not all apps do seeks in flat files.