01 July 2008 - 04:47A Ham-Handed Slam ...
at our favorite targets: ignorance and sloth. Actually, this is a round of applause for an HP customer of Symas OpenLDAP. After some months of hemming and hawing, this customer has just updated their plans for benchmarking and while not perfect, it is comprehensive enough that they'll quickly learn on their own how to make it better. Benchmarks are learning experiences for all involved. We wish them the best going forward.
If only so many more would take that first step ...
Setting up a benchmark is simply not that hard. Imperfect though slamd may be in the eyes of the ultimate purist (Howard, for example), it is a powerful, stable, and highly usable tool. We use it (with some of Howard's own "enhancements") but your results would not differ from his because we haven't tweaked the workloads or done anything to bias the data. It's a matter of generating the data for a directory, loading the directory, and pointing your slamd rig at it. The answers you get tell you a lot about the directory technology (and your application assumptions) in short order.
The OpenLDAP Project and Symas assert that OpenLDAP is the highest performance LDAP server software available. We've invested quite a bit of our own effort benchmarking it against other LDAP technologies and have published our results when technology owners haven't hidden our results behind license restrictions. Our reports include access to the detailed configuration information, database load templates, and slamd details. We are confident that anyone following the same simple methodology can reproduce our results quite closely. We are also confident that subject matter experts might tweak configuration settings and get different results but doubt they'll do wildly better than we did (we do as much tweaking as we can to try to get the best out of every technology for the scenarios). The point is that our benchmarks speak for themselves and if you think there's a getter solution out there, do us all a favor and run the numbers!
Failing that, we remain confident that OpenLDAP offers the lowest infrastructure costs and, by a large margin, the lowest cost of ownership of any LDAP Directory technology available. But don't take our word for it. Pick up a copy of slamd and benchmark your current directory technology against OpenLDAP 2.4 and see for yourself. If you need help, give us a shout!
No comments:
No trackbacks: