I'm adding counters to the Attribute and Modification structures, a_numvals and sm_numvals to track the number of values in each. I've added an attr_valadd() routine that will add arrays of values to an attribute and update the counter. This can eliminate most of the empty for loops we're using to count these values at various points. But it means other code that assembles Attributes manually needs to be updated. Fortunately most of these are easy to spot now since they generally have to use attr_alloc(). I believe I have them all.
This is the first stage in a larger transition, to using sorted arrays for multivalued attributes. I haven't quite decided how the next steps will play out just yet.
Note that we already do a sort on incoming attributes, but that code currently has ORDER_PRESERVING defined so after duplicate checks are done we discard the sort info. That preserves the existing/historical slapd behavior.
However, I'm pretty sure this is going to have to change. Using sorted arrays will allow us to use binary search to find values, which will be a big win for attributes with very many values. This will speed up test_filter, Compare, ACL processing, etc. etc...
We can also implement this without any user-visible change, if we keep an auxiliary ordering array, the way the current sorter does. But it seems to me that that will be too much memory overhead. It also makes add/remove that much more tedious...