Hi,

 

I’m observing an issue where a large number of searches against an openldap server results in a large amount of disk writes occurring.

 

I have 10 hosts performing the same workload, the hosts are running slapd 2.4.21 under Ubuntu Lucid. If I stop searching against one of the hosts I see disk write activity from that host drop dramatically. I initially noticed the high write activity in the VMware stats for the hosts and have used iostat on the hosts to gather further info. The hosts being searched are slaves in a slurpd replication environment; they do not have replication logging enabled, the directory is using a hdb backend.

 

Over a 5 minute period the average disk write activity is 8517KB/s when being searched, and 41KB/s when not being searched; over the same time period the average disk read activity is 8KB/s.

 

When performing searches against a host an average workload is 300 searches/second, average entry size is 450bytes, and average entries returned is 30.

 

The hosts have plenty of free RAM and are not using any swap. I have disabled the monitor backend but haven’t seen much of an improvement by doing this, given the monitor database is instantiated at startup is this stored in memory? (if not, why not make that an option?)

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to why reading from the directory would be causing disk writes at such a high rate?

 

Thanks,

Adam