Re: [pure-ftpd] Sorry, we were unable to read [.]

Am 22.02.2020 um 11:13 schrieb Lorenzo Milesi:

> I've recently migrated an ISPConfig server from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 18.04,
> now powered by pure-ftpd-mysql 1.0.46-1build1.
> One user has a huge directory containing >300000 files. To manage it we added the
> LimitRecursion file with "500000 50" as content. It was playing well on the old
> installation on 1.0.35-1, but on the new one we just get the following error on the client:
> Sorry, we were unable to read [.]

[...]

> How can I debug the issue?

In your other mail you've already found out that it's the number of files
in the directory. This is an effect you see with many file systems when
the number of files in a directory exceeds a limit (often somewhere in the
range of 50,000 to 100,000).

I've had similar effects as well on Linux systems where it suddenly became
very slow without any changes to the number of files in a directory. The
reason was that after an update of my software more attributes of a file
were accessed than before, so I assume that something similar happened
here with pure ftp.

The topic is quite old. You have similar effects e.g. when doing a
find-operation searching for files of a particular user and
accessing an NFS-mounted device. At least that was the case in the
90s when somebody did that on the CS-network of my university, maybe
it's not that bad anymore ;-)


Cheers, Lothar