\_ SMTP quoth technomage on 12/2/2002 12:43 as having spake thusly: \_ \_ > ext2 \_ 2 gb max file size, unknown of number of dir entries or max disk size. news spool partitions are typically inoded in such a way to cope with more small files. I don't know if there's a fs limit in ext2, but after a few thousand files, it's practically unmanageable by humans. \_ > ext3 \_ still finding out Given that ext3 is ext2 on steroids, my guess is for the purpose of this discussion ext3 == ext2 \_ > reiserfs afaik reiser isn't bound at 2G file size limit. YMMV. Also, when I was at the first perl conference Tom C was mentioning he went from a 60k record flat file to a sql implementation because he was having poor performance. Going sql...degraded performance. He converted back to flat file and bought a bigger processor...bingo! He had the performance he wanted. :-) He refered to it as the "Intel solution". David