Preparing your LDAP Directory for HP-UX Integration

hurt more than help. Because of this, a typical indexed database would make a few

optimizations. For example, suppose you had a database where all entries were of the same

objectclass type (say posixAccount.) In this case, it makes little sense to create pointers for

posixAccount in the objectclass index, since those pointers would point to every single entry!

The posixAccount pointers would require a lot of memory, but provide little value. However,

when using the HP-UX LDAP Integration products, having the large set of pointers helps more

than hurts.

The Netscape Directory 4.x server has a configuration parameter known as the "All IDs Threshold." This

parameter tells the database to not create pointers for indexes when the database discovers that there is a

large number of the same type of an attribute. For example, suppose you have a database with 5,000,000

entries representing people. Lets say that in this database that 10,000 of those people had the same given

name, "givenname=Jane". If the all-ids-threshold was set to 5,000, then a pointer in the givenname index

would not be created for the "Jane" entries. However if the all-ids-threshold was 50,000, then pointers

would be created for "givenname=Jane". In the first case, it would take a long time to search for Jane in the

directory. In the second case, the server response would be much quicker, however the database indexes

would require much more system resources.

When the NIS/LDAP Gateway or LDAP-UX Client Services products are used, setting all-ids-threshold too

low will have a devastating impact on both application and server performance. To greatly improve

performance with a large database, assure that your all-ids-threshold parameter is greater than the number of

posixAccounts or posixGroups (which ever is the larger.) Modification of the all-ids-threshold is a slightly

complex task on the Netscape 4.x directory server. Please refer to the "Netscape Directory Server 4.1

Administrator's Guide"

in chapter 7 for further details.

Netscape Communications Corporation, 1998, "Netscape Directory Server 4.1 Administrator's Guide",

Chapter 7,

http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/index.html?content=directory/41/ag/contents.htm