* The first report came from Tony Bates (You probably still remember him * ;-)) and most of the discussion was done on the 'db-wg' mailing list * (true this subject belongs more on rr-impl). We more or less (wrongly?) * assumed that you were on that mailing list and that if Tony had this * problem it was something new ... Well, I seem to have dropped off most mailing lists.... Please put me back on db-wg... * * way DBM grows its datafiles. It basically is rather stupid when it needs * * more space and will take an increasing chunk of disk space for the * * index. Not using the -p option will only be a temporary measure, only * * because you make the database smaller (no prime entries) but you do * * make it flatter. Try and make or run a perl with sdbm or gdbm. These * * two have better size control than the standard dbm (esp gdbm) but are * * slower when indexing. * * This was also my conclusion, but we would like to know for sure that it * is the dbm package since this problem appeared within *one* week with * several people using completely different sizes of filesystems... I don't * like to maintain a timebomb that will go off some other day ... I better * be sure about this. If they all mirror the RIPE DB, they will all see the problem at about the same time. Trust me, it is dbm, Tony and I tried indexing with a lot of other versions of dbm when we wrote the code and saw exactly the same behaviour for the default dbm package (try indexing the Internic database without the -p option.....) * I hear that most people recommend the Berkeley db package so I am * experimenting with that one ... (Check the perl5 man pages 'man * AnyDBM_File' and you know why ;-)). Yup. Perhaps it is time to move to perl 5, that will take a bit of rewriting though.... -Marten