From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sun Mar  3 19:56:50 1996
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From: bugs@freebsd.netcom.com (Mark Hittinger)
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Subject: re: pwd_mkdb - really slow :(
To: hackers@freebsd.org
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 22:00:45 -0600 (CST)
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> From: Rashid  Karimov <rashid@rk.ios.com>
> 	I have quite afew systems here with ~10.00 accounts
> 	on ea ... and pwd_mkdb is _very slow now ... Takes
> 	2+ minutes to rebuild the damn databases every time.
> 

I had some systems with over 15,000 accounts in the databases and the
performance was terrible! :-)

Guido van Rooij wrote some patches for pwd_mkdb that do "update-in-place" of
the password database.  These patches made a tremendous difference for me.
If the record doesn't already exist, it is added without a rebuild of the
entire set of files.

Perhaps Guido can post the latest version of his adjustments.

The process of changing a password on vanilla FreeBSD is an amazing one!
We modify a record in /etc/master.passwd, we then build pwd.db, spwd.db,
and passwd!  We have a lot of redundant records laying around.

Any site that has a large number of users or is considering having a large
number of users should search the archives for Guido's patches.

Regards,

Mark Hittinger
Netcom/Dallas
bugs@freebsd.netcom.com