30 April 07 - 10:48Some Thoughts About Performance

There have been some pretty spirited interchanges here about performance. There is a pervasive feeling in the industry that software performance (efficiency) is a non-issue. I suspect that's a belief adhered to by the 95th percentile of modern computer users and developers. At least, that's the way it feels.

For reasons mentioned in the recent comments, Symas can not act as if software efficiency and performance are unimportant. There are two reasons for that. One is practical and the other is a fundamental point of philosophy.

Heavy stuff ahead ... read on

- Symas - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

23 April 07 - 04:59A Rant from An Older Hacker

Howard Chu, Chief Architect of both Symas Corporation and the OpenLDAP project, posted an entry on this blog some time ago titled, rabid ramblings of a deranged hacker which was, in his inimical style, challenging and edgy. A comment stream began with some push-back and righteous indignation. So far, so good.

Then we got this screed from Alex Karasulu, who, apparently, is the Benevolent Dictator over at the Apache Directory Services project. It was pretty angry and hostile. We don't edit or delete comments unless they're spam and this was not spam. See my personal response, below.

- Open Source - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

19 April 07 - 06:31OpenLDAP on ohloh

Ohloh posted a report about OpenLDAP. Interesting stuff! (more)

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19 April 07 - 04:40A Quality Interchange: OpenLDAP vs Others

Kostas Kalevras (an active contributor to the FreeRADIUS project and seemingly all-around good guy) has been following our blog here. He posted this comment on Howard's performance rant on his blog.

Jordan has approved this post

- OpenLDAP - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

16 April 07 - 13:01Anti-FUD

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13 April 07 - 23:44Sun Propaganda

Saw a query asking about the advantages of Sun's Directory Server over OpenLDAP over on one of the Sun forums. I suppose the answers were what we at Symas expect to see in a Sun forum too. So they've exercised their bias, now it's time for a little balance. The fact is, on any given platform OpenLDAP scales far beyond Sun's or anybody else's directory software. Cycle for cycle and byte for byte nothing else is anywhere close to OpenLDAP's efficiency.

- OpenLDAP - two comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

11 April 07 - 18:12Size and How You Use It

Saw a few other things that bugged me, so time to get them off my chest. Our pal Ludovic at Sun wrote in his blog a few months ago Is this the biggest directory? and of course the answer is No. Likewise the Fedora Directory project home page brags about running "many of the largest directories in the world."

Let's set the record straight - the largest and fastest directories in the world today (and for the past couple years) run on Intel Itanium servers, and they run on CDS, Symas' build of OpenLDAP.

- CDS - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

10 April 07 - 21:14rabid ramblings of a deranged hacker

The past week has shown me a few things I hadn't realized before. E.g., there's more than a couple handfuls of people interested in directory technology these days, but not a lot of them are any good at it. The Fedora project bills itself as "powerful open source ldap." The OpenDS project has a stated goal "to provide high performance." The ApacheDS project states their "vision is to build an enterprise directory server platform and its components."

Have some guts. If your aim is to be the best and fastest in the world, say so. But understand what that really means...

- OpenLDAP - sixteen comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

09 April 07 - 04:52More Numbers (OpenDS and a hint at ApacheDS)

Some more numbers have come in. Howard continued over the weekend and into this morning. The last post was about benchmarking OpenLDAP 2.3.34 (OL) against Fedora Directory Server 1.0.4 (FDS). This post gives a glimpse of OpenLDAP 2.3.34 against OpenDS 0.1-34 (ODS) on the same hardware and software as FDS.

Authentication Rate performance of OpenDS was much closer to FDS than we expected; OpenLDAP was 3.7 - 3.9 times faster. OpenDS actually outperformed FDS at 2.5M entries (by a little). Load times and Search rate (see earlier post) were much worse (loading 247% - 265% the time for OL and 3.3 - 7.7 times slower search rate).

Oh yeah, Howard struggled to put ApacheDS's Release 1.0.1 through its paces. Let's just say that we agreed that enough was enough after a clean run at 250K. Load times - OpenLDAP 45 seconds, ApacheDS 3,051 seconds. Search rate: 1,689 entries/sec. Authentication Rate: 632 auths/sec.

- OpenLDAP - ten comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

08 April 07 - 07:48Some Numbers: Fedora Directory Server vs OpenLDAP

The boys in the back room (Howard Chu and Quanah Gibson-Mount) have been off playing with slamd again. There will be a much more detailed look at these runs on the Symas Web site soon, but here's a sniff.

Pictures below, but OpenLDAP 2.3.34 delivered 66% to 72% faster load times and authentication rates from 3.5 to almost 3.8 times that of Fedora Directory Server 1.0.4. So much for the old wives tale that FDS is faster than OpenLDAP. BTW ... this SHOULD represent the performance of Red Hat Directory Server, too (unless they've been mucking about with the code in proprietary source mode). This clearly substantiates Howard's strongly stated belief that OpenLDAP is the fastest directory server on the planet!

- OpenLDAP - two comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

05 April 07 - 00:10OpenLDAP as Content Database?

Howard and I spend a pleasant few hours with Six Apart, the developers of movabletype (mt) blogging platform and the typepad, live journal and vox blogging services. They have LDAP enabled their software and wanted Howard Chu, Symas's and OpenLDAP's resident genius (Chief Architect) to review what they'd done and make suggestions.

Jordan and I went along for big picture stuff (and lunch).

Generally, they've done a nice job on the LDAP support and we had a grand time. (more)

- CDS - four comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

04 April 07 - 23:19How Embarrassing!?

A BUG in a sample file? Couldn't be. This blog post helpfully points to a trailing blank problem in the sample LDIF.

I'll bet it gets fixed (one way or the other). Of course, you could put together your own test data, something useful. But none of us do that ... do we.

- OpenLDAP - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

04 April 07 - 01:11New Performance Benchmark?

We will keep the guilty nameless, but during a Symas benchmarking run someone missed the point that a competitor's directory wasn't set up to support anonymous queries which is what the benchmark used. Essentially, the results were for directory no-ops. Not to report the results for FDS the unnamed directory server, I hear that OpenLDAP can do about 30,000 directory no-ops (authentications?) a second. (more)

- OpenLDAP - two comments / No trackbacks - § ¶