[Info-vax] naming convention in VMS MAIL

[terry-groups at glaver.org]

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 5:02:19 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> And I doubt the answer has changed since some yutz wrote the following 
> an aeon or two ago:
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/l7L2SbFdP2I/RsteYU4bjnYJ

Ages ago (VMS 5, long before Alpha), somone wrote a "turbomail" patch for VMS mail that a) split the mail directory into multiple subdirectories and b) used shorter filenames so more would fit in a given number of directory blocks. It worked quite well, as long as you could figure out the changes needed to the patch whenever a VMS update replaced any of the relevant images.

However, this was entirely due to design choices made by VMS (127 block directory limit, no index of directory blocks so things like $ PURGE took approximately forever, etc.). I can say that old hardware was definitely not the cause - although disk transfer rates, etc. were glacial (3MB/sec was considered exceptionally fast) because simply booting BSD Unix on the same VAX gave lightning-fast access to the same number of mail messages (in native Unix format) despite maintaining them in plain old text files.

Since then there have been some improvements in VMS, and a lot of the speed loss was papered over by vastly faster hardware.

This is one of the things that people looking at a finished VMS on x86 will likely be testing - how long (both CPU and elapsed time) does VMS/x86 take to perform a task compared to Windows Server/x86, Linux/x86, or whatever. Unfortunately for VMS, the things that will be tested will likely be things that do not take advantage of VMS's features - in the above example, mail. Likely also things like Perl scripts, MySQL or other database benchmarking, etc.