[HEADS UP] upcoming /etc/services updating

[Michael Bushkov]

Hi,

> Robert Watson wrote:
> BTW, since this is in the context of significantly increasing the size of 
> the services database, have we:
>
> (1) Measured what impact adding the cache daemon for local databases has?
>     Specifically, does adding the cache daemon for a database like
>     /etc/services, /etc/passwd, etc, improve performance, or add overhead?
>
> (2) Looked at adding /etc/services.db, similar to the other compiled 
> database
>     pieces, in order to improve lookup times for very large tables.  This
>     change would be orthoganal to a cache daemon.

getpwXXX() and getgrXXX() functions work slower in about 3 times with cached 
enabled when only "files" source is used. The thing is, I think, I'll be 
able to improve cached's performance to reduce this drawback. Currently, 
cached gives real performance gain with sources such as DNS and LDAP and is 
not that useful with local sources, except the "services" database (I'll do 
accurate benchmarking with all types of sources and will post the report 
with its results). I'll test the cached performance with very large 
/etc/services file. However, at this moment, the solution with compiled 
database for services will be probably faster. Anyway, cached can be used 
right now to allow IANA list importing without significant performance 
drawbacks, IMHO.

With best regards,
Michael Bushkov