as I am in the situation where I have to do large imports with ldapadd, I wanted to share a little tip that is saving me a lot of time and may be helpful to others too.

As I don't care for data consistency *while* importing (if the import should abort, I can alway restart the process), I'm stopping the regular slapd and run it manually under the control of 'eatmydata', a little tool that LD_PRELOAD's all filesystem sync operations to noops. This has increased the speed of my import tests by several orders of magnitude.

Here's my script (slightly obfuscated):

Best regards

Karsten