It's not the disk space - it's the RAM and CPU. Create a directory with
512,000 files with 8-character names in them sometime. Delete all
except a dozen files in it. 'ls'. wait. wait. wait. See the problem.
This is a problem on mail and news servers (both in spool directories).
Things like seasonal or topical newsgroups, spammed mailing lists, etc,
which might never bloat to the same size again but for some short time get
to that size.
Other things like 'open()' also get slowed down from memory.
If we were shrinking when the directory size *halved*, a news server with
decent expires time and frequent enough expires runs would only be shrinking
seasonal/topical groups - the group size doesn't usually halve in one expire
run.
David.
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