[imp] ldap

[Mike Coughlan]

The big advantage of LDAP is that it can be used as a public contacts DB by
both Netscape and Outlook.  We are using it as such for a company wide
Rolodex with a web front end.  I imagine it will have significant traffic
and use.  I don't mind losing some bytes on the hard drive, but it also
sounds like it may cause LDAP to eat additional memory on the server, if the
LDAP database is cashed in memory.  That is less acceptable.

Is that a big risk, and if so, how can I claim the space back?

TIA,

Mike C


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Stevens [mailto:rstevens@publichost.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 2:24 PM
To: imp@lists.horde.org
Subject: Re: [imp] ldap


Mike Coughlan wrote:


Most LDAP implementations use DBM as the back end.  When you modify an
entry, the DBM back end essentially has to delete the old entry and add
the modified entry on to the end as though it was a new entry.  The
space used by the old entry isn't reclaimed, and as such, leaves a
"hole".  If you update your LDAP a lot, the DBM files grow and grow,
with a large portion of the space unused.