Service manual
Tuning Indexing for Performance
134 Sun ONE Directory Server Installation and Tuning Guide • June 2003
Tuning Indexing for Performance
In many cases, tuning indexing for performance implies activating indexes to
speed up frequent searches, and disactivating indexes that are expensive to
maintain and not frequently used.
For large deployments involving replicas dedicated to specific applications, you
may opt to configure different indexes for different Directory Server instances. For
example, consider a topology with:
• Masters handling writes only
• Hubs handling the replication load to consumers
• Some consumers dedicated to specific applications such as messaging
Themasters in thiscase do nothandle searches, soyoumay choose not to maintain
expensive substring indexes on the masters, for example. You may also determine
that some other indexes are hardly ever used and can be disactivated.
The hubs essentially receive no client requests other than administrative requests,
so you may in this case disactivate all but system indexes required by Directory
Serveritself.
On specific consumers dedicated to individual applications, you may decide to
disactivate all indexes not used by the application. Which indexes you disactivate
depends on the searches performed by the particular application.
Allowing Only Indexed Searches
Directory Server makes it possible to prevent costly unindexed searches, returning
LDAP_UNWILLING_TO_PERFORM to clients requesting an unindexed search.
To prevent unindexed searches against a particular database, set the
nsslapd-require-index attribute value to on for the database:
NOTE Database backups include indexes,and so should match the
Directory Server configuration.
After changing how indexes are configured, back up both the
configuration and the data.