Re: OpenLDAP API: why to use asynchronous functions?

[Pierangelo Masarati <masarati@aero.polimi.it>]

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> johnmiller@email.it writes:
> > why should I use asynchronous functions? 
>
> Your application might have some other work to do.  Like responding to
> user input, if it's an interactive application.  Then you can send the
> LDAP request, do some work, check for the LDAP response, if it has not
> arrived do some more work, and so on.
>
> Also you don't need to wait for the response to one LDAP request before
> sending the next, except with Bind and Start TLS.

Another advantage is that if entries returned by a search can be 
independently handled by the client, you don't have to wait for the 
whole dataset to be available to start handling it.

> > From the LDAP client point of view, do they use less memory or more?
>
> The ldap_<foo>_s() functions are just wrappers around ldap_<foo>()
> followed by ldap_result() and maybe ldap_result2error().  So you might
> get them to use less memory on errors if you cripple your error
> handling, but otherwise it should make little difference.

Well, in case of a search that returns a lot of objects, using an 
asynchronous call will give you a chance to deal with entries as soon as 
they come in, so you might end up using less memory.

p.