🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi NOVELL users, I hope you can help me with a problem,

  I run a NOVELL 3.11 server.  The server hardware consists of some SCSI
  disks on an ADAPTEC controller, a 33MHz 386DX processor and 32 Megabytes
  of memory.

  The problem is not the hardware, but the way in which NOVELL automatically
  increases the number of directory entries.  The following is a partial
  list of some of my volumes:

  Volume     TotalK   FreeK   UsedK  TotalD   FreeD   UsedD    %DEU
  ------     ------   -----   -----  ------   -----   -----    ----
  SYS        113316   28952   84364    9824    4761    5063    51.54% 
  VOL1        69624    7304   62320    5408    3081    2327    43.03%      
  DOCVOL     286800  127628  159172   69024   62735    6289     9.11%
  EEDEPT      62000    3520   58480   28384   26259    2125     7.49%
  EEDISK     225272   18804  206468   23776   15574    8202    34.50%
  BIGDATA    431000   28328  402672   25344   25153     191     0.75%
  SOFTWARE   250072   39780  210292   13984    6954    7030    50.27%
  UNDERGRAD  132000   44428   87572   15040    8167    6873    45.70%

  Totals:                            190784  152684   38100

  Key:  TotalK  =  Total size of the disk volume (in K)
        FreeK   =  Free space on the volume (in K)
        UsedK   =  Used space on the volume (in K)
        TotalD  =  Total number of directory entries on volume.
        FreeD   =  Number of free directory entires on volume.
        UsedD   =  Number of directory entires used on volume.
        %DEU    =  Percentage of the volumes directory entries in use.
        
  As you can see a the %DEU (Percentage Directory Entry Usage) of some
  of the volumes is rather poor.

  I have a number of questions, these are:

    1. Do unused directory entries take up entries in the directory
       caching space?  I suspect they do and this is what is causing
       me to be short of cache memory.

    2. Can one reduce the number of directory entries without recreating
       the volume?  I remember doing this on our old 2.15C server, but
       I cannot see any way to do it on a NOVELL 3.11 server.

  One interesting thing I found was a problem with WordPerfect 5.1 that
  caused vast numbers of zero length files to be created.  This is what
  caused DOCVOL's total directory entries to become so large.  If the
  files had some length, then they would have filled the volume and
  NOVELL would have to had purged them, but because they were zero length,
  this never happened and we ended up with 55000 of them! This problem
  only occurred in one user's directory and there are 10+ people using
  WP51 on that volume. I still do not know what he does to cause these
  files to get created. Any ideas?

  Thanks in advance for your help.

--
Graham Jack,
Department of Electrical Engineering,
University of Cape Town.
e-mail: JGJack@Eleceng.uct.ac.za