Subject: Re: Slow authentication / wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-15]

From: [email-masked] (Andy Church)
Date: Tue, 07 Jul 1998 10:21:50 EDT

>I am experiencing very slow authentication with my wu-ftpd, and was
>wondering if anyone else may have seen this too;  I am running wu-ftpd
>under Digital Unix 3.2G;  The machine is an AlphaServer 1000, with 512
>megs of ram. There is typically very little load, so I don't believe this
>is a system resources problem.  This machine functions as a staging
>server, so there are generally 10-20 users logged in at any time;  Our
>/etc/passwd contains approx 1600 lines, /etc/group 1500 lines, and our
>wu-ftpd ftpaccess file contains about 900 lines.

     How many of those are upload lines?  If you have more than a couple
dozen, then with that size /etc/passwd it's going to take a long time to
process them--wu-ftpd does a getpwnam() and getgrnam() for every such line.
To speed that up, get my upload directive patch from:

ftp://achurch.dragonfire.net/wu-ftpd/upload.patch

which allows you to enter numeric UIDs in the format "%NNN" instead of user
and group names; the numeric values are (of course) parsed much more
quickly.  See README.patches in the same directory for more information.

  --Andy Church                  | If Bell Atlantic really is the heart
    [email-masked]       | of communication, then it desperately
    www.dragonfire.net/~achurch/ | needs a quadruple bypass.

---

From: [email-masked] (Andy Church)
Date: Tue, 07 Jul 1998 10:29:11 EDT

After looking more closely at the source, let's try that again:

>wu-ftpd ftpaccess file contains about 900 lines.  Most of these lines are
>just guestgroup entries, as we chroot all of our ftp accounts.

     Try ftp://achurch.dragonfire.net/wu-ftpd/guestgroup.patch; it does
more or less the same thing as the upload.patch I mentioned a few minutes
ago, as long as your users have the proper group as their GID entry in
/etc/passwd.  I'll take a closer look at those functions later.