RE: deferring operation?

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
> [mailto:owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Paul Reilly

> I'm seeing a lot of "deferring operation" mesages being logged.
> These seem to build up until they are happening every few seconds,
> or for every query to the LDAP server. At which point the whole thing
> just grinds to a halt. I'm using OpenLDAP for squid auth, so
> that grinds
> to a halt too...
>
> Apr 25 13:51:42 unix slapd[28196]: deferring operation
> Apr 25 13:53:15 unix slapd[28196]: slapd shutdown: waiting
> for 438 threads to terminate
> Apr 25 13:53:26 unix squid[20651]: Squid Parent: child
> process 29572 exited with status 0
>
> What would cause slapd to defer the operation?
> Does it indicate a bad config, or resource shortage?
> Restarting slapd seems to cure it for a while.

Most likely both a bad config and a resource shortage. You didn't mention
what hardware/software platform you're running on, or which version of
OpenLDAP you're using. With default settings for OpenLDAP 2.1.17, 438 threads
would consume about 5.25GB of RAM in stack space alone. I hope for your sake
that you're running on a 64-bit machine with much more memory than that.

  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
  http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
  Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support