Avamar: Backup reports "<5079>: Large number of entries in directory" and "Listing not perfectly sorted"

An Avamar client backup log reports the following messages.

avtar Warning <5079>: Large number of entries (288694 > 50000) in directory "O:" -- Listing not perfectly sorted.

This occurs where avtar encounters a directory which contains many entries under the specified directory.

This means anything higher than 50,000 for regular file system backups, or >200,000 for NetApp and NDMP backups.

No action is needed.

The 'bigdirgroup' value affects the number of files in a directory which avtar processes into a 'sorted' order within a backup.

The higher the value, the more sorting must occur and the more memory avtar consumes.
This results in a longer time to handle that particular directory within the dataset.

If the number of files in a directory exceeds the 'bigdirgroup' value, avtar still sorts the first 50,000 files, but the remaining files do not appear in sorted order.