MAX FILES PER PROCESS PROBLEM - (nf)

[preece at uicsl.UUCP]

#R:ccieng5:-19600:uicsl:12500017:000:878
uicsl!preece    Nov 29 08:58:00 1983

			  Any program that really needs more than 20
	open file descriptors at one time is probably too complicated to be
	maintainable anyway, and should be redesigned.
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I've responded to this statement before, but it's worth repeating.
Even if YOUR problems don't naturally require lots of files  you
should not assume you've seen all the problems in the world.  I'll
give you one easy example: a distribution sort of alphabetic records.
Just open one file for each letter and partition the incoming records
into 26 files. That easy, obvious, and no problem to maintain. It also
requires at least 27 files open at once.  Our group has come across
several situations where we could have used a great number of file
descriptors and where reorganizing to use fewer files at once added
significantly to the complexity of the problem.

scott preece
ihnp4!uiucdcs!uicsl!preece