I found the final proof of this conclusion by tweaking slapadd to use DB_PRIVATE when creating the environment. This option just uses malloc for the BDB caches, instead of shared memory. I also ran with tcmalloc. This time the slapadd took only 3:04:21. It would probably be worthwhile to default to DB_PRIVATE when using the -q option. Since slapadd is not extremely heavily threaded, even the default system malloc() will probably work fine. (I'll retest that as well.)
-- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/