deferring operation?

[Paul Reilly <pareilly@tcd.ie>]

I'm seeing a lot of "deferring operation" mesages being logged.
These seem to build up until they are happening every few seconds,
or for every query to the LDAP server. At which point the whole thing
just grinds to a halt. I'm using OpenLDAP for squid auth, so that grinds
to a halt too...

Apr 25 13:51:42 unix slapd[28196]: deferring operation
Apr 25 13:53:15 unix slapd[28196]: slapd shutdown: waiting for 438 threads to terminate
Apr 25 13:53:26 unix squid[20651]: Squid Parent: child process 29572 exited with status 0

What would cause slapd to defer the operation?
Does it indicate a bad config, or resource shortage?
Restarting slapd seems to cure it for a while.


Paul