[Samba] Simple Samba PDC - tdbsam limitations?

simo idra at samba.org
Fri Dec 21 19:55:12 GMT 2007


On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 13:48 -0500, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
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> Charles Marcus wrote:
> > Charles Marcus, on 12/21/2007 8:06 AM, said the following:
> >> What are the limitations of the tdbsam backend, with respect to
> >> performance and the number of workstations/users it can reasonably be
> >> expected to support?
> > 
> > Never mind - of course this is well documented in the most excellent
> > 'The Official SAMBA-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide'...
> > 
> > For anyone curious - it is not generally recommended to use the tdbsam
> > backend for sites with 250+ users, but this is only because these sites
> > likely will be spread out and require BDCs and multiple servers...
> > 
> > They specifically mention one site using the tdbsam backend with 4,500+
> > users with no performance problems whatsoever...
> > 
> > Sorry for the noise.
> 
> This is extremely timely for me, since I was looking into this subject
> just this morning.
> 
> I have about 11,500 users on an smbpasswd file! :-o This does not work
> very well, and we recently reached a breaking point. I looked into
> tdbsam, figuring that that might be the easy way to go (I do not need
> replication, as this backend is running a computer lab, not 11,500
> concurrent users). The fact that my setup is two orders of magnitude
> larger than the recommendation for tdbsam gives me pause.
> 
> Can anyone comment on this? I'm sorta in an emergency situation, not a
> design situation... I'm almost looking at MySQL because that is
> something that I could reasonably deploy in the next 48 hours. LDAP
> would require at least some substantial reading for me, I'd think. Maybe
> not.

If you do  not need to replicate user information elsewhere tdbsam is
the fastest backend you can get.

The recommendation about 250+ users has more to do with network
topologies usually implemented when you get around these numbers, and
has nothing to do with the scalability of the backend itself.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat Inc. <ssorce at redhat.com>



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