[Mapserver-users] Deleting old GIF image files

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Point taken re: absolute numbers versus date based culling.

Thorsten wrote:

> Apart from that, I do not know if the comparison is an expensive
> operation or not; if it is, I would rather have it run once on a bigger
> bunch of files (cron job) than repeatedly on a smaller number (the
> 'embedded' solution), especially on a system that is already busy
> producing maps.

I'd guess inexpensive compared with the time taken to read and
render GIS data and that PHP is being called as a CGI. You'd
be reading inodes, but not data. Easy enough to test.

And less content in a directory *may* reduce the time taken to
locate and load a rendered image into a page. This is assuming
that a request will need to read "." (dot) to figure out which
inode it needs to read from. I tested it and it didn't make more
than a second of difference.

Antti