Indexing

Whenever a new volume is added to the file system, it must be initialized. New volumes are initialized one at a time and sequentially in the order in which they were created. Initializing includes indexing, in which File Server for Macintosh systematically examines the entire directory structure and creates an image of the entire structure of the volume, which is saved in virtual memory. The indexing stream is updated once at startup and once at shutdown. After indexing is complete, it does not have to be recreated. Instead, the stream is read at startup, and the image is updated with any changes that have occurred to the file since the server was shut down.

During the indexing of the volume, non-paged memory use increases, but this use is temporary. Non-paged memory use depends on the number of directories in the volume (The number of files does not influence use.) The non-paged memory is released after indexing is complete.

The initialization of a volume occurs sequentially. A volume is not available (that is, visible on the network and available for mounting) until it is completely initialized. Therefore, if a large volume is being created before a small one, the small volume does not appear until after the large one.

Virtual memory use is also affected. As a rough estimate, a combination of 10,000 files and directories can take up to 2 MB of virtual memory. It might be useful to tune the Performance System attribute for increased virtual memory in Control Panel to prevent performance degradation with volumes that contain more than 10,000 files and directories. If the indexing information cannot be written to disk at shutdown, a new one is created again at startup.

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