LDAP-UX Integration Performance and Tuning Guidelines

The NIS/LDAP Gateway can act as an NIS server for many NIS clients (maintaining one connection to the LDAP

server, on behalf of many clients.) The NIS/LDAP Gateway also has tunable caching. The NIS/LDAP Gateway

acts as a buffer between the client and LDAP server. This reduces the load on the LDAP server significantly, as

compared to many clients accessing the LDAP server directly. For this reason, the NIS/LDAP Gateway has

performance near that of a traditional NIS server. So, this paper will focus on the later case, performance

requirements of the native LDAP-UX Client.

The Name Service Subsystem

The name service subsystem on a HP-UX system consists of several APIs and several data repositories to serve

those APIs. The following man pages on an HP-UX system describe the APIs:

getpwent(3C), getgrent(3C), gethostent(3N), getnetent(3N), getnetgrent(3C), getprotoent(3N),

getpublickey(3N), getrpcent(3C), getservent(3N), netdir(3N).

These APIs each have sub-variations, such as getpwnam and getpwuid, which are part of the getpwent family. The

getpwent() API is used to enumerate the user accounts on an HP-UX system. Applications use the getpwnam() API

to find a specific account by its name. Applications use the getpwuid() API to find a specific account by its id

number. As an example, login calls the getpwnam() API to convert the login string into the user’s account

information. The getpwuid() API is called by the ls command, when converting a file ownership ID number into

an account name.

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