On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Peter J. Braam wrote:
> 
> > Where will the limits lie?  I think that I can see that we can scale Coda
> > to approximately 500,000 files over the next year (the size of the files
> > is irrelevant). There will be implementation changes needed for that which
> > are not backward compatible, and you'll need a kernel patch on the
> > servers.  Getting beyond that would require major rewrites.
> 
> Is this 500,000 files on *one* server, or total for an entire coda
> namespace distributed among multiple servers? Basically, can one get
> around this limit by thowing a bunch of machines at the problem? (Possibly
> in a cluster application?)

Isnt part of the problem the client, which afaik is not supposed to have a
large cache, say greater than 300mb or so. 

For example if you were to 'head' or 'tail' a large file, the entire file
needs to be transferred into the local cache first, and then finally the
data is made available to the running program. Makes mmap completly
useless too -- nfs deals with these situations right? How far into coda's
future is this ability, I think this is whats holding it back.

I was really hoping to have home directories mounted over coda, with inbox
being stored right in the accounts, (and also large procmail filtered
mailing-list archived mail folders) but that wont be feasible until at
least write-back caching is available in a connected state.

I just got coda running recently, but the initial excitement has faded
somewhat after discovering the above.. :(

- lv