[SSSD] Very slow listing of files owned by many different users. Any solution?

Mark London mrl at psfc.mit.edu
Wed Jun 27 17:18:28 UTC 2012


Hi - We are running SSSD with LDAP at our site, where we have several 
hundred users.  LDAP is being served by our Windows domain server.

With entry_cache_timeout set to a short value, when someone does an 
operation that requires information for multiple users, i.e. listing the 
owners of all of the user's home directories via the command "ls -l 
/home", this will take many many minutes to complete.  Of course, this 
happens, because an LDAP request has to be issued for each user, and 
then stored in the database.  Further similar operations will complete 
quickly, during the entry_cache_timeout period.  But such operations do 
not occur that frequent enough for the data to be kept in the cache.

The only solution seems to be sto imply increase entry_cache_timeout to 
a very large value.  Of course, this is not ideal, because changes to 
the ldap entries will not be seen for a long time.  A kludge workaround, 
would be to keep a low timeout, and have a cron job that runs the 
command "ls -l /home" every 5 minutes, on each workstation.

Is there a more elegant way to solve this problem?  Thanks.  - Mark




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