Re: 2.1.17 performance issues

[Andreas <andreas@conectiva.com.br>]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 08:19:32AM -0700, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> failure I see here is not a lack of documentation on the OpenLDAP side, but 
> a lack of willingness of users to go read documentation, and instead rely 
> on asking questions of the list on how to do basic configuration.

The administrator's guide, for example (http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin21/),
only mentions one bdb-specific directive (item 5.2.4.1), and it's the "directory"
one (that's basic indeed). It, however, refers the user to the slapd-bdb manpage
which has many more directives.

But, if you compare the ammount of documentation devoted to SASL and openssl (other
two examples of big outside projects that openldap uses), you'll see that the
default backend is way behind in terms of documentation in that administrator's
guide. To complicate things a little more, this backend is quite different than
the others in the sense that important parts of its configuration are not done
in slapd.conf, but in another specific configuration file. Some configuration
directives are even ineffective in slapd.conf, such as the cachesize, when using
the BDB backend. This is very confusing and was the problem with our friend in this
thread.

I would suggest that eventually the FAQ entries regarding the BDB backend (or, better
yet, the whole performance tuning section[1]) be merged with the administrator's guide.
In my opinion, this guide is way easier to navigate through than the FAQ.

[1] http://www.openldap.org/faq/index.cgi?_recurse=1&file=190