On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Tim Mooney wrote:
1. Authentication takes much longer if you are at the end of a very very
long password flat file (ie. 10,000+ and 100,000+ account entries)
Most UNIX platforms have supported database-backed password files for
years. Linux is no exception. Do some searching for libnss_db for more
info for Linux.
Recent versions of most commercial UNIXes and Linux also can exceed the
2^16-1 barrier for uids, so it's certainly possible to have more than
65,535 passwd file entries on one host.
I am aware of problem with large password files on very old versions of
BSD and commercial UNIX. I haven't heard of any such problem in any
modern UNIX type (BSD, Linux, or commercial UNIX) system for many years.
2. Updates to password files take much longer when they are very large
(if you are re-building them from a database for example).
That's odd. I've never noticed that phenomenon, and we had systems even
10 years ago that had 35,000+ accounts on them.
I have to agree. A password file with 100,000 users in it has somewhere
on the order of 8MB of text. Such a file is not "large" by any modern
definition of the term; and a database worth the name with such a small
amount of data should be capable of generating an 8MB text file instantly.
Most cases that I saw where this was slow involved some truly wretched
algorithms, apparently intended to minimize memory use at the cost of
massive computing overhead.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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