Re: Problems with scheduler

[Andy Poling <andy.poling@jhu.edu>]

On Fri, 21 Apr 1995 brtmac@ksu.ksu.edu wrote:
> I'm curious about one aspect of zmailer's performance.  We have a
> system with >11,000 entries in the passwd file.  We are running
> sendmail 8.6.12 on a SS5/70.  sendmail is currently able to handle the
> load, but until we upgraded to the SS5 from an IPC stock sendmail
> wasn't able to.  I was able to make sendmail keep up with the load by
> replacing the getpw routines with routines that accessed a gdbm file
> with the passwd information stored in it.
> 
> How does zmailer access the passwd file?  Is anyone running zmailer on
> a system with a large passwd file?  If not, how do people deal with
> thousands of mailboxes?

The same system which processes the 70k msgs also has 6000-some passwd 
file entries.  ZMailer has caching built into the database stuff, and it 
considers the passwd file a database.

I had to turn off this caching, though, to ensure that new passwd file
entries got used (we update the passwd file at arbitrary times).

I think that our passwd file is a pretty permanent part of the OS disk 
cache...

-Andy

Andy Poling                              Internet: Andy.Poling@jhu.edu
UNIX Systems Programmer                  URL: http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~andy/
Homewood Academic Computing              Voice: (410)516-8096    
Johns Hopkins University (Balto, MD)     UUCP: uunet!mimsy!jhunix!andy