fast user authentication (was: Newbie question: setting userPassword field)

[Michael Ströder <michael.stroeder@inka.de>]

Dave Carrigan wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, John Kristian wrote:
> 
> > Dustin Sallings wrote:
> >
> > > There are about 80 LDAP modules for Apache.  The one I use verifies the
> > > password by binding as the user ...
> >
> > That's a good, portable, future-proof technique.
> 
> However, this does have a significant performance impact
> [..]
> But, if you have 10 child http's, that means that there are 10 caches that
> have to be populated, so performance is still going to be affected. And if
> the children exit after n requests, their caches go with them.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Apache expert programmer and this topic gets
slighty off-topic here.

You might want to have a look at how mod_ssl
(http://www.modssl.org/) handles the SSL session cache. IMHO it's
pretty much the same problem.
IMHO mod_ssl offers two options:
1. The cache is stored in a DBM cache file on disk.
2. The cache is stored in shared memory area (library by
Engelschall).
I'm sure Ralf Engelschall will point you to the relevant parts in
his source.

Ciao, Michael.