*BSD News Article 98026


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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
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Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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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