Helix Core Server Administrator Guide: Fundamentals (2019.2)

Large sites and old filesystems

Use the spec.hashbuckets configurable to define the number of buckets (subdirectories) into which files in the spec depot are hashed. By default, spec.hashbuckets is 99; for each type of object, directories associated with objects in the spec depot are allocated between 99 subdirectories.

To disable hashing, set spec.hashbuckets to 0, as follows:

$ p4 configure set spec.hashbuckets=0

With hashing disabled, for each subdirectory for each spec type, one sub-subdirectory is created for each object, and all of these sub-subdirectories are stored in one single subdirectory. Disabling hashing may subject your installation to filesystem-imposed limitations on the maximum number of subdirectories in any one directory (for example, the 32K limit imposed by older ext2, ext3, and ufs filesystems).