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Re: slapd future questions



--On Wednesday, April 07, 2004 4:45 PM +0200 Wout van Albada <wout@science.uva.nl> wrote:

Hello,

I've seen several threads on this list about whether to
use the LDBM or BDB backends for slapd. The last one
"LDBM verse BDM" had Frank Swasey saying LDBM wasn't
receiving much/any development. This brings up the
following questions:

1. Is it true that LDBM isn't receiving development?
2. How long will LDBM be supported?
3. Is the BDB backend considered stable enough
   for production environments?
4. Are there plans to move away from the BDB backend to
   some new backend in the known future?
5. How long will the BDB backend be supported?

From what I can tell, BDB became the backend of choice in OpenLDAP 2.1.
That has continued into 2.2, with the addition of HDB, which uses Berkeley DB as its backend as well.

For question 3, Stanford has been using BDB as its production backend since April 2003. After resolving some initial issues with the help of Howard Chu, it has performed wonderfully.


Also, I've tried compiling OpenLDAP threaded as well as
non-threaded. For the kind of queries I ran (indexed
searches) I found the non-threaded server to be faster,
even on a machine with 2 physical CPU's with hyperthreading
(so the OS used them as 4 CPU's). Which leads to more
questions:

6. Do people recommend running slapd without threads?
7. Will running slapd without threads be supported in the
   future or is it a "your mileage may vary" thing?

I think that threads vs. non-threads depends entirely on the OS you are using. OpenLDAP with threads under Solaris performs extremely well for me. Threads under various linux platforms has not worked so well for me in my testing (but I'm also using an old libc). I plan to do some more testing, using debian sarge instead of debian woody, and test without threads.

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/TSS/Computing Systems
ITSS/TSS/Infrastructure Operations
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html