Re: preferred hardware/OS/compiler for slapd

Mark Wahl (M.Wahl@critical-angle.com)
Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:08:25 -0600

> I will be ordering hardware to put up a slapd server in the near future.
> If you were buying a brand-new system as a standalone slapd server for a
> 44,000 name database, what would you buy, and what additional software
> would you put on it?

my $.02:

I have built SLAPD on Solaris 2.5 SPARC and Solaris 2.5 Intel x86, with the
SunPRO (on SPARC) and gcc 2.7.2 (on Intel) compilers. On these platforms
SLAPD can use Sun threads. Be sure to have sufficient physical memory to hold
the server's in-memory entry cache (by default 1000 entries, but tunable). If
your directory is to be read-only, you don't bulk reload over protocol and the
majority of operations are "listing" searches, then performance can often be
improved by caching the entire directory in memory.

I would recommend using either GDBM or the Berkeley DB btree underneath.

BTW the LDBM databases are not interchangeable between the SPARC and Intel
platforms due to byte order differences.

I note that there are some differences in SLAPD's mapping onto pthreads that
would require some work to have it built with threading on Linux.

SLAPD does not run on NT; this would require a nontrivial porting effort.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions, or are interested in ways
of connecting your SLAPD directory into the PARADISE Internet White Pages...

Mark Wahl, Enterprise Directory Integration
Critical Angle Incorporated