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From: ccs@aber.ac.uk (Christopher Samuel)
Subject: Re: Efficient fingerd?
Message-ID: <1994Jan26.171757.21629@aber.ac.uk>
Organization: UseNet Cabal (West Wales Cadre) Active Service Unit
References: <2i3pnq$d3h@scratchy.reed.edu>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 17:17:57 GMT
Lines: 37
[Cc'd to Nelson, but I thought this would be of interest]
In article <2i3pnq$d3h@scratchy.reed.edu> of comp.unix.ultrix,
nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar) doodled:
> We seem to be receiving lots and lots of finger requests at our site
> now, enough that it looks like it might be impairing our system
> performance. (reed.edu is also our main CPU and NFS server - small
> school, you know.)
>
> Our passwd setup is also pretty monstrous - 2000 entries over yp. If
> my guess is right every time we're fingered a new fingerd is reading
> that entire file over yp. I know it's slow when ps has to do it, so I
> suspect fingerd is no better.
At Aber our YP passwd file is just over 5,000 entries, and finger (when
used without the -m option) was practically useless. Remote fingers
were a real killer for YP.
The fix was trivial, move /usr/ucb/finger to something else (like
finger.ucb) then put the following shell script in it's place.
#!/bin/sh
/usr/ucb/finger.ucb -m $*
Ta-da - all finger programs only match on user names, using getpwnam().
NOTE: This does lose you functionality, in that you can't do "finger chris"
and find all the Chris's there, but it saves a hell of a lot of
processor and YP (hence RPC) activity...
Chris
--
Christopher Samuel, Computer Unit, U.W Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, WALES
E-mail: ccs@aber.ac.uk PGP key available via finger ICBM: 52.24'N, 4.4'W
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