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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!chi-news.cic.net!newsxfer3.itd.umich.edu!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.nacamar.de!news-kar1.dfn.de!news-fra1.dfn.de!news-koe1.dfn.de!news.rhrz.uni-bonn.de!news.chemietechnik.uni-dortmund.de!Uni-Dortmund.DE!Dortmund.Germany.EU.net!interface-business.de!usenet From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: Huge passwd file and consequences... Date: 19 Jun 1997 08:17:26 GMT Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden Lines: 24 Message-ID: <5oapum$ibr@innocence.interface-business.de> References: <rd205z52gj.fsf@epiphore.francenet.fr> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: ida.interface-business.de X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-31809-14 X-Fax: +49-351-3361187 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:7026 Gildas Perrot <perrot@francenet.fr> wrote: > My problem is that when I added 10000 users to 10000 existing ones, 3 weeks > ago, the host started to be very slow in response for POP sessions. I assume > the cause is the increased time of authentification due to the increasing of > the passwd file size. That's not supposed to be the case. 4.4BSD uses a .db version of the passwd file for actual authentication. Perhaps you could tweak the db parameters (i understand that you can change some, but i have no clues about db itself). The only remaining problem in the 4.4BSD model was that rebuilding the entire db file e.g. after someone changed his password took a huge amount of time. In FreeBSD, some contributor (Guido van Roij, IIRC) improved the password database handling so that all changes affecting just a single user only (passwd, chsh) only rebuild this entry. Thus, only vipw still suffers from the huge delay. Not sure whether BSDi did something similar, or considers importing the FreeBSD changes. -- J"org Wunsch Unix support engineer joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de http://www.interface-business.de/~j