Re: openldap server load serving sendmail access map

[Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org>]

>>For reference, I did some debugging to see what sendmail does with the
>>access map...
>Thanks for that; I'd often wondered myself.
>>Given the way sendmail does all these possible lookups (and this is just
>>for the access map, we haven't gotten into the other maps), I'd say that
>>it is more efficient to use a local Berkeley DB for the access map, but
>>the LDAP solution is nicer for centralization and flexibility.
>How about a compromise?  Centralise the information in LDAP, and rebuild
>the local access map each night.

It certainly isn't ideal how sendmail does it, but to accomplish the
same thing I don't see how they have any other method.  If all those
queries are made over the same connection (without close-ing and
rebinding) and those attributes are indexed it isn't really that big a
deal.  We just give the mail host it's own local replicant and let
sendmail beat the crap out of it.  An interesting question is whether
sendmail does connection pooling/recycling.  To me, that is the avenue
to pursue to increase performance.