LDAP-UX Integration Performance and Tuning Guidelines

Performance Factors

The number of client search requests generated is the most important factor in determining the number of clients an

LDAP server can support. Additional factors are

• The effectiveness of the pwgrd caching daemon.

• The effectiveness of the ldapclientd cache daemon.

• The types of search requests (enumeration vs. single entry)

• Directory server CPU performance

• Amount of available memory for server caching

• Complexity of ACLs used to protect directory data

• Amount of available network bandwidth and network latency.

Note: Directory server CPU performance typically becomes a performance bottleneck before

network bandwidth.

Disk performance is typically not a factor, if sufficient memory is available as a long-term cache. And, because

directory servers are designed to be scalable, the size of the database (number of entries in the directory server)

largely does not affect performance, if the database has been configured (Indexed) properly, also assuming sufficient

memory is available as a long-term cache. See “Preparing your LDAP Directory for HP-UX Integration”

for more

information.

Several variables affect these performance factors. This document assumes the following:

• The LDAP server has sufficient memory to provide a long-term cache for the data being requested (this

includes the database indexing cache as well as for the entries themselves.)

• The network has enough available bandwidth, such that networking collisions are kept to a minimum (less than

1%.)

• Networking latency is minimum (must be a local area network, of at least 10base-T performance, with at most

one hop between nodes.)

• The LDAP server is dedicated to serve only the requests from LDAP-UX clients.

• The LDAP server uses “typical” ACLs to control access to data. Typical in this case means minimally complex

ACLs, used to protect the data, as described by the “Prepare your LDAP Directory for HP-UX Integration”

document.

Given these assumptions, the remaining primary factor that affects the number of requests that can be handled the

server is its CPU performance. Testing data reveals that an HP-UX L2000 2-way LDAP server can handle a

maximum of 323 LDAP-UX requests per second (see page 13 for details on the test environment.) In this document

a “request” is considered to be one operation performed by the name service switch (a call to getpwnam() is one

request.) To determine how many clients can be served by this system we only need to determine the peak and

average load of an average LDAP-UX client system.

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