Re: [Help-gnu-radius] Long startup time

[Greg G]

Gerald wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Greg G wrote:
>
>  
>
> >   It's a really large users (~22500 users) file.  How could I have less
> > than one entry per user anyway?
> >    
>
> *cringe* Ouch. Your setup is painful to think about. :-)
>
> Ok, first thing I recommend you do is move those users to a database of
> your choice. mysql takes no time to install and is pretty quick to catch
> on to. If you need help with setting up mysql or moving users into the
> database, out of kindness to the list I will help you off list for stuff
> that falls off topic for the list.
 Well, we've got some other issues that prevent us from doing that 
right now.  We're already up and running with an old Livingston radius 
server that's using the files, and we don't want to change that right 
now.  Especially if we're not sure that the new server isn't stable.

> You are hitting your first growing pains of using the users file for all
> of your users. When you tell radius to reread the configs, it has to parse
> from the beginning to the end of the users file to make sure syntax is
> correct and all which is unnecessary for most any radius setup. If you
> move your users to a database, then rereading config changes takes mere
> seconds...and the user information will be called from the database as
> needed.
>  
   It's not even a matter of that at this point.  It's that the dbm 
code in GR is horrible in a couple of ways.  First, the generator (which 
is what's taking all of this time) is making files that are 20 times the 
size of the original.  Second, I can't make GR read them in the first 
place.  If these could be fixed, this time issue would go away.

-Greg G