In my experience Net::LDAP is rather slow. Pathetically slow. I can
understand why people using it would advise you to just write in C instead.
We use Net::LDAPapi which was written by Clayton Donley and subsequently
abandoned. This module uses XSUBs to call libldap directly; it is very fast,
very nearly as fast as running in straight C code. At Symas we've taken the
last public release of Net::LDAPapi and added a few LDAPv3/OpenLDAP API
features to it - support for binding to an LDAP URL, support for StartTLS,
SASL binding, and some other miscellaneous extensions.
We also use it with EmbPerl in Apache for easy web access to LDAP. I highly
recommend both of these modules; they make this kind of programming trivially
easy.
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support