Size limits to refer bibliographies?

[Eugene Miya]

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I am trying to maintain a sizeable bibliography using refer.   Mine
is approaching 4000 titles with all sorts of IEEE, ACM, and other keywords
and some sizeable annotations.  The work is being done on 4.2 using
Bill Tuthill's improved refer system.  My question is: has anybody
determined any critical size limits?  I did a search recently which
resulted in the truncation of some annotations and I believe that
good parts of the bibliography were not searched (like the latter half
of the alphabet).  Does anybody else have a bibliography of this size or
larger?  Can anybody comment on other size related problems?

--eugene miya
  NASA Ames Res. Ctr.
  {hplabs,dual,hao,vortex}!ames!aurora!eugene
  emiya at ames-vmsb.ARPA