[Samba] Samba and large implementations

[Daniel Jarboe]

abartlet at samba.org wrote:

 > There are some known scalability issues with Samba 2.2, --with-pam or
 > --with-utmp  (an n^2) problem.  You will no doubt find other issues too,
 > but I do believe it will be more reliant on who Linux/390 scales.
 >
 > How will these users be authenticated etc?  This is the main area where
 > I can comment, and one of the first problems you will encounter.

What is --with-utmp supposed to buy you anyway?  I'm working in a RH 7.2 
environment with 2.2.6, using winbindd to authenticate against an NT 
PDC.  Is --with-utmp supposed to cause connected users to show up in a 
'who'?  It doesn't seem to.  Also, is the default of obey pam 
restrictions = no sufficient to avoid this n^2 problem, or am I better 
off rebuilding the spec without it?  Will that cause me to lose 
pam_winbind.so et al?  I'm looking at a much smaller domain (about 3000 
NT id's, with no more than 500-700 concurrent connections).  Are there 
more of these configuration settings that could cause significant 
bottle-necks?

Thanks,
~ Daniel