Running slapcat and slapd at the same time

[Chris Card <ctcard@hotmail.com>]

Hi all,

I am running openldap 2.4.36 with Berkeley DB 4.6.21 under centos 6.3 64 bit on a Dell 710 with 96 Gb RAM.
My slapd configuration sets the BDB cachesize to use a shared memory segment of 47 Gb (id2entry.bdb is about 40 Gb currently).

I use slapcat to take regular backups using the same configuration as slapd, running in parallel with slapd, and the backup works successfully, but uses a lot of memory when it is running.

I would like to be able to run slapcat with a smaller memory requirement, and to this end I have experimented with running slapcat with a different configuration as follows:

1. create a work directory
2. create links in the work directory to the .bdb files
3. slapcat  cn=config to an ldif file
4. edit the ldif file to change the db data directory to the work directory and change the olcDbConfig settings to use less memory
5. slapadd the ldif file to create a new slapd.d config directory in the work directory
6. run slapcat with the new slapd.d config

The reason for this approach is to allow slapcat to run with a different DB_CONFIG file to slapd.

This appeared to work in testing, but in the production environment produced backups with data missing, while outputting no error messages.

Is there a way to run slapcat with a different memory configuration to slapd? 

Chris