Yes, the model is essentially one of a central write-master with all
clients being replicas (using our own replication technology). We do
want to think about moving away from this, however, possibly using
local proxy-caching with a handful of servers replicating from the
master with syncrepl. It's all still to be investigated properly, but
there's certainly an incentive for that.
Ok, well you should have really mentioned "using our own replication
technology", and since we have no way of knowing what this is or why
you are using it, we can't possibly help diagnose if this is having
an effect on slapd, other than what we have already discussed.
Why not use an open/rfc'd proven replication technology?