Shortcutting on a local server

["Dave Steck" <DSTECK@novell.com>]

Some interest has been expressed in the possibility of automatically shortcutting some steps when talking to a server on the same machine as the client.  Theoretically if a client is talking to a server hosted on the same machine, you'd like to avoid the protocol stack, SSL encoding, and perhaps the ber encoding.  The advantage is greatly increased performance.

Suppose you could determine the local machine issue at ldap_init() time.  If any of the host names was to the local machine, you automatically use it.  Although the spec says you should use the first one you can connect to, you would in general want to go to the local machine over another one.

There are many more issues, and the architecture of OpenLDAP may not lend itself easily to doing this.

I'm interested in some feedback.  Is this fundamentally a BAD idea, architectural nightmare, great if it can be done, etc.