Performance of SGI nsd with LDAP

[Thomas Suiter <tsuiter@midusa.net>]

I'm trying to move to a "single-signon" environment, and am starting into
my performance testing phase.  I'm running into some performance issues,
that I had planned to eliminate.  We have been running with a flat passwd
& shadow file with ~18,000 users.   Below is some background info which
may or may not be of interest if you are not running on a SGI with Irix
6.5.x.

-----

On a couple of SGI Challenge S's with Irix 6.5.3m with nothing else being
run on them.

I've written a perl script that slurps all of the users into an array
indexed by UID.  I iterate 50 times where I randomly pick a UID and do a
getpw request measuring total time it took to do 50 lookups.  It takes 20
seconds to do 50 which hit both shadow & passwd files, 9 if only passwd.
When I take a baseline benchmark of the flat passwd and shadow files it
takes ~5 seconds to do both shadow & passwd lookup.  

I have tried this with the ldap server running on the same machine and on
another machine, also have tested openldap & Netscape Directory (which
interestingly enough came to be the exact same results).  I have also had
multiple machines doing this to the same ldap server with no degredation
of service (still at 20 sec for each machine).  

I'd assume that since both machines where running the perf. script at the
same time and both still had the same benchmark, that it's something
within SGI's nsd implementation.  I don't know if it rebinds and
authenticates for every password lookup or if it stays connected and does
another search.

Thomas Suiter
____________________________________________________________________________

	Thomas P. Suiter		|	       Systems Administrator
	tsuiter@midusa.net		|	   NetSpace Internet Service
	Fax: (785) 825-5873		|		      (785) 823-3565
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