Chris, First, let me thank you for your even-handed input. I appreciate the time you took to write back and think through the possible trouble spots for people using the suggested hybrid solution. I also understand that you were not speaking from experience, but from a gut feeling regarding the superiority of an enterprise SQL/RDBMS, so it's not like I can call you on fabricating anything. :)))
The problem is that you're wrong. The Registry lays waste to SQL at any user level. My benchmarks from a few weeks ago were for only 1000 cycles, it's true. I have updated them tonight to 100,000 cycles to better reflect large Imail installations, and the results follow. As before, machines are two otherwise identical PII-400s, one Win2K Pro workstation with 192 MB RAM and one WinNT Server/SQL Server 7 with 384 MB RAM. Intel Pro/100+ cards in each, with a 100Base-T full-duplex connection. Both are fully patched with up-to-date drivers. For the Registry, I tested the time to read 100,000 REG_SZ password values under 100,000 user keys (RegQueryValueEx for HKLM_SOFTWARE\testbed\usernnnn\passwd). The test was run from the workstation to its local Registry. For SQL, I tested the time to read 100,000 password fields from 100,000 user database rows (SELECT passwd FROM testbed WHERE username = 'usernnnn') with a covered index on the username and passwd columns. The test was run from the workstation to the server using DSN-ful Named Pipes. The results over 5 tests, with the machines otherwise idle: Registry: avg. 374.6875 seconds SQL: avg. 23.8 seconds As Len said, it's actually a very good little ISAM! Remember that the Registry is used for the NT SAM, which, despite its size limits, is a *relatively* robust authentication/authorization directory managing a lot more complex info than Imail in a true multi-user environment. Chris, as I said in an earlier message, I do believe that most Imail admins don't do a DBA's job of optimizing SQL Server. In many cases, they ignore indexing, for one thing (since it's not automatically done by ODBCUSER.DLL, some think it might not help, I guess). Likewise, my guess is that few try more costly technologies such as VIA. But the Registry has a huge bang for the buck. Regards, Sandy Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
