I meant that they do it in the right order, and not in the order Mike is using to create a slow ports tree.

I disagree. I believe there is locality of reference for news groups, and thus a group (directory) having been accessed, the articles will be accessed in that locality (which *will* be in cache).

It seems that what you are complaining about here is that the very first article will come up slow (but, this ignores the fact that we preferentially cache directory entries over file entries, so this will only apply when the server immediately comes up, not after it has been used for a while).

In any case, news articles should probably be stored on a newsfs, such as the one currently under developement, which uses btree indices for various key fields that NNTP can ask for articles with, including header items, not just news group information.

Right. Then don't do that.

If you want to do something about this, commit my changes from two years ago that seperate the inode and directory allocation policies. This will let you replace the directory management code (in the current code, they are inextricable because the policy breaks are in the wrong place in the code, as I have complained and patched to no avail for several years now). I suggest using a btree, like HPFS and NTFS do.

Quit exagerating "suboptimal" into "pessimal" just because you have once boundary case where the implementation is pessimal when it doesn't really have to be. 8-).

I already volunteered at least part of the soloution back in 1996...

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