Bug 335364

Description Denis Roy 2011-01-25 13:55:47 EST

When an Orion server has many users, each user's directories are created as subdirectories under serverworkspace, like such:

orion:serverworkspace/ # ls -l
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 19 17:22 -
drwxr-xr-x  3 user users 4096 Jan 18 08:23 .metadata
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 14 07:42 7    <- belongs to user A
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan  6 07:19 B    <- belongs to user B
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 20 09:24 BB   <- belongs to user A
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 20 18:53 BC   <- belongs to user A
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 24 11:43 BD   <- belongs to user C
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 24 11:58 BE   <- belongs to user D
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan  6 10:43 F    <- belongs to user A
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 14 04:42 G    <- belongs to user D
drwxr-xr-x  2 user users 4096 Jan 14 05:26 H    <- belongs to user E
drwxr-xr-x  3 user users 4096 Jan 14 07:23 K    <- belongs to user F
drwxr-xr-x  9 user users 4096 Jan 14 07:12 L    <- belongs to user A
drwxr-xr-x  3 user users 4096 Jan 14 07:11 M    <- belongs to user B
... and do on

From an administration standpoint, this is unmanageable because:

a. all of one user's data is spread out across multiple directories under a common "root".  This makes it difficult to isolate a specific user's data (without parsing .prefs files), difficult to restrict disk space, difficult to perform backups and restores

b. not scalable.  If a million users each have 3 directories, the above serverworkspace would contain 3 million entries.


I suggest creating one container directory per user, and grouping users according to the first character of their ID:

serverworkspace/
|---------- 0
|---------- 1
|---------- 2
|---------- 3
..
|---------- a
|---------- b
|           `----- boris
|                  |----- MyStuff
|                  |----- Some Directory
|                  `----- Another Directory
|---------- c
|---------- d
|           `----- denisroy
|                  |----- folderA
|                  |----- folderB
|                  `----- folderC
..
|---------- A
|---------- B
|---------- C
...


The above strategy will facilitate storage expansion, scalability, backup, restore and restriction directly at the OS level.