Opportunistic Garbage Collection Obviousness

In linear hashing (typically used in Pick-based systems) it's normal to have a bucket that can hold multiple records. Records with the same hash are chained in a bucket, and should the bucket overflow, the records are often chained on the end of the file. So let's say your "modulo" is 20 - buckets 0-19 - the first bucket to overflow chains into 20, then next into 21, etc.

This then causes a bit of grief when the modulo increments, because you have to shove bucket 20 out of the way to create a new bucket 20 as non-overflow.

At least one implementation (Prime Information) used a special file/directory type, so each SEGSAM file contained subfiles, one per bucket, and they could grow as big as required.

Cheers,
Wol