Limit of 65000 folders

[simoncn]

Apologies for the forum issues. My hosting provider updated PHP to a newer version and this caused forum searches to stop working. I tried to fix this by updating to a later version of the forum software but something went wrong with the update and the forum was left in a semi-working state. After trying unsuccessfully to find a quick fix for this, I decided that the best way forward was to revert to a recent backup of the forum and redo the update using a different procedure. While all this was happening, I needed to take the forum offline, hence the 403 errors.

The 65000 folder limit is based on memory resource issues. When MinimServer was first released in 2012, a key feature was its ability to run on low-end devices, including some NAS devices with only 128MB of RAM for the operating system and all applications. As MinimServer holds key data structures in RAM for good performance, these structures needed to be as compact as possible and (without going into too much technical detail) this led to the 65000 folder limit. As the design point was to handle a library of 100,000 files (not folders), this number seemed sufficient and indeed has been sufficient for all users until now.

Things have moved on since then, with all current NAS devices having at least 256MB of RAM and some MinimServer users having very large libraries, so I will look again at how I can redesign the internal structures of MinimServer to remove the 65000 folder limit. One option is to allow up to 65000 folders for each content directory. As MinimServer can have up to 8 content directories, this would increase the limit to over 500,000 folders. Another option (which would consume more memory for small and medium-sized libraries) is to change the internal data structres of MinimServer to allow an unlimited number of folders.

This change will not happen immediately, so you need a workaround for now. Your suggestion of using a second Mac with a different hostname would work well. With this setup, there is no need to change port numbers because the MinimServer instances are differentiated by hostname, unlike the situation where multiple instances are running on the same machine.