Re: free/non-free ladp servers comparizon

[Ron Chmara <ron@Opus1.COM>]

> >Some of the openldap list is now convinced that your tests of ldap
> >were "bought and paid for by Microsoft"... a rather odd
> >conclusion, considering iPlanet comes out on top in your
> >tests....
> >I have to tell you, though, your results seem really off for openldap.
> >I've done a few installs, and I've never seen it run quite that slow
> >on searches... 
> >-Ron 
> >

Joel M Snyder wrote:
> That's pretty funny.  I don't suppose you could tell them how
> I feel about Microsoft...  But, we call 'em as the benchmarks
> run, and that's the way they showed up.

Wow. It's just so spectacularly bad. Hm. Maybe some better defaults,
a better default setup, a more documented approach to user tuning would
have helped their scores... any chance of a "round two" article being
written, after they made some changes to their software install/setup?

> The OpenLDAP stuff is as it came out of the box.  So in the
> absence of any tuning, it really runs like a total dog. 

Got it. It's based on just stock install, and the stock install
isn't much on indexing settings, on cache settings, etc. There's
the occasionally thread on open-ldap about performance problems,
and it usually comes down to simple index tuning and caching
settings being *manually* entered into a config file somewhere.

The defaults perform horribly, and it shows. :-(

> Part of
> this is the lack of documentation, and that's sort of the price
> that an open source product has to pay---if you want to compete
> with the big guys, you have to at least write down what it does,
> how to tune it, etc.  And they haven't.
> jms 

Well, after much digging, I found the tuning info I used (between 3
websites, scrounging through mailing lists, etc.) , but I'd have to
agree that it's not exactly comparable in documentation and tuning
to oh, iPlanet DS, with happy pointy-clicky configuration,
full manuals in an easy place online, etc. It still has that old
open-source mindset of "You vill manually configure, und you vill
enjoy it!". Maybe this will help inspire better documentation,
setup instructions (such as including performance info in the
basic setup info), interfaces, etc. out of the openldap team,
and some decent performance defaults....

(Note to openldap folks: this is what I use for better performance
in /etc/openldap/slapd.conf....
----
# do not log anything by default, as it slows everything down
loglevel 0 

# set a decently large record cache, 1000 users by default? Not.
# sure would be nice if this auto-sized somehow, or could
# be configured in percent of records (say, 50% half the records)
cachesize 15000

# Use a larger db cache, 100000 byte default is silly for
# any machine made after 1996.
dbcachesize 1500000

# disk syncing should be an OS function, comment this
# out for troubleshooting if you're crashing the OS a lot
dbnosync

# Set a smaller return amount for excessive wildcarding
sizelimit 50

# if it doesn't happen in a minute, free up the resources
# for something else
timelimit 60

# index standard search items, no indexes are used by
# default, but these are in constant use on most servers
index cn,sn,uid,email pres,eq,approx,sub

---
And put a link to /doc/admin/ on the homepage, for cryin out
loud...)

-Ronabop

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