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Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 02:10:01 -0800 (PST)
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From: Nick Hilliard <nick@iol.ie>
Subject: Re: bin/5193: Long rebuild times for pwd_mkdb with large master.passwd files
Reply-To: Nick Hilliard <nick@iol.ie>
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The following reply was made to PR bin/5193; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Nick Hilliard <nick@iol.ie>
To: fenner@parc.xerox.com (Bill Fenner)
Cc: nick@foobar.org, FreeBSD-gnats-submit@freebsd.org, wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de
Subject: Re: bin/5193: Long rebuild times for pwd_mkdb with large master.passwd files
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 10:00:50 +0000 (GMT)

 Bill:
 > Would it make sense to try to guess a good default based on the size of
 > master.passwd, so the user doesn't have to decide what value to pass?
 
 Yeah, I thought about this, but it would have taken more experimentation to
 find out some direct relationship between the two.
 
 The other problem with this is that if you make pwd_mkdb set the cache size
 automatically based on the size of /etc/master.passwd, it's also going to
 have to do other things like checking the total amount of RAM, and compare
 that against the amount of available RAM.  Otherwise, if someone had, say, a
 50,000 line passwd file, it might trash the system if there were other
 memory intensive processes lying around.
 
 Apart from anything else, if you have large passwd files, you're probably a
 sys-admin in a large establishment, and you're probably going to be clueful
 enough to figure out the "right" amount of cache to use.
 
 Wolfram:
 > BSDI has a similar fix for the problem. FreeBSD should use the same
 > option name and semantic as BSDI. See the pwd_mkdb manpage at
 > www.bsdi.com .
 
 BSDI uses '-c' for specifying the cache size, which conflicts with the
 FreeBSD '-c', which is used for doing a syntactic check of master.passwd. 
 So the only option here would be to change the current FreeBSD '-c' option
 to something else.
 
 Nick