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

From: Erik Beebe <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 09:37:14 -0400 (EDT)

Hello;

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.  Most of these lines are
just guestgroup entries, as we chroot all of our ftp accounts. The server
runs fast otherwise;  When I ftp in, I get a login prompt immediatly;
However, after I enter my login and press <cr>, I usually have to wait
45sec-2mins to get a password prompt.  However, from this point on, the
server is lightning quick.  Any ideas?  Does this have to do with the
large password file?  Any ideas to speed this up? 

Thanks in advance,
Erik

--
Erik M. Beebe                           Infinet
Publishing Systems Administration       Phone: (757) 664-2227
Email: [email-masked]                  http://www.infi.net

---

From: Gregory A Lundberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 10:11:07 -0400 (EDT)

> large password file?  Any ideas to speed this up? 

This is a known problem with the design of the server and the size of the
passwd and group files.

To work arround it, you should reduce the number of guestgroup lines in
ftpaccess.  I find there is seldom reason to use more than one or two
lines; all my normal shell users are members of the same guestgroup (with
UNIX permissions used to keep them away from each other's files), and a
few guestgroup entries for true guests (customers of my customers).  The
advantage is that the daemon needs to parse fewer lines from the ftpaccess
file and, therefore, make fewer checks against the /etc/passwd and
/etc/group files.  Another workarround is to patch the server to use
numeric IDs in the ftpaccess file, which should speed up the parsing the
/etc/group accesses as well. 

ISTR there was quite a bit of discussion about this subject a long time
ago on the mailing list, and that a few patches were proposed.  You could
go back through the mailing list archives for additional ideas.

The location of the latest version of wu-ftpd can be found in the 
directory
 
      ftp://ftp.academ.com/pub/wu-ftpd/private/
 
You can't see the directory contents, so read the message informing you
of the actual filename to retrieve. It's there.
 
wu-ftpd Resource Center:  http://www.landfield.com/wu-ftpd/
wu-ftpd FAQ:              http://www.cetis.hvu.nl/~koos/wu-ftpd-faq.html
wu-ftpd list archive:     http://www.landfield.com/wu-ftpd/mail-archive/

----

Gregory A Lundberg		Senior Partner, VRnet Company
1441 Elmdale Drive              [email-masked]
Kettering, OH 45409-1615 USA    1-800-809-2195