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Re: LDBM verse BDM



On Thu, 1 Apr 2004 at 3:55pm, Michael J. Erdely wrote:

> Is there a convincing reason to go use a dbm backend instead of ldbm?

Yes, there are several.

1) ldbm is not receiving much (if any) development.

2) ldbm has a single lock, so if you can get yourself into a situation
where the whole server becomes unresponsive for an extended period of
time.  For example, you fire off a search based on a non-indexed
attribute that takes a long time.  Someone else asks to modify an
attribute.  Their modify is stuck behind your search and any other
searches that try to start are now stuck behind their modify.  Several
times before I switched to back-bdb, I had to recycle the servers
because things were not working.  I haven't had a single one of those
deadlock situations since converting to back-bdb.

3) ldbm does not allow slapd to be up and running while performing a
slapcat (bdb does).

> It seems that the ldbm backend is much easier to setup.

That's true.  However, it's kind of like saying an automatic
transmission is easier to drive than a manual transmission.  There are
trade-offs.  You'll get better gas mileage with a manual transmission
once you have learned how to properly operate it.

> I’m running OpenLDAP version 2.1.25 on Redhat Enterprise 3 and plan on
> supporting about 30k-50k users with about 6-9 indices.

I would suggest that you upgrade to 2.1.29 (there were some interesting
features in 2.1.25 [as I recall -- but they may only be related to bdb]
that have been fixed in 2.1.27 and beyond).

> With the ldbm backend, does anyone have any good equations to determine the
> “cachesize” and “dbcachesize” settings?

I do not.

> I have only 512 MB of memory but plan on ramping that up to 2 to 4 GB.

For the size database you are running 4GB would be plenty for a well
tuned back-bdb installation.  I am running several 2.1.27 servers.  I
have a couple on RH9 with 2GB of memory and a couple more on RHEL3 with
4GB of memory and they're all running back-bdb.

I don't recommend RH9 (unless you also upgrade cyrus-sasl due to bugs in
the version RH shipped -- I have to recycle saslauthd once a week).

-- 
Frank Swasey                    | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Systems Programmer              | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont           |    just like everyone else.
        === God bless all inhabitants of your planet ===