Indexes

Most LDAP servers use indexes to improve the search performance. To use indexes, consult your directory server documentation.

In addition to the basic indexed attributes, the following list of attributes must be indexed to ensure that Solaris clients will be able to retrieve naming information in a reasonable time.

membernisnetgroup    pres,eq,sub
nisnetgrouptriple    pres,eq,sub
memberuid            pres,eq
macAddress           pres,eq
uid                  pres,eq
uidNumber            pres,eq
gidNumber            pres,eq
ipHostNumber         pres,eq
ipNetworkNumber      pres,eq
ipProtocolNumber     pres,eq
oncRpcNumber         pres,eq
ipServiceProtocol    pres,eq
ipServicePort        pres,eq
nisDomain            pres,eq
nisMapName           pres,eq
mail                 pres,eq

The abbreviations used in attribute list expand to: pres is presence, eq is equality, and sub is substring

Additionally, if Virtual List View control (vlv) is supported by the server, vlv indexes also need to be created. Create these indexes for any container in the tree that contains a large number of objects. (Large is relative to other objects in the tree.) For information on how to create these indexes, consult your directory server documentation. Ensure that the vlv sort value is set to cn uid and the vlv filter and scope are defined per the following list:

getpwent:      vlvFilter: (objectclass=posixAccount),     vlvScope: 1
getspent:      vlvFilter: (objectclass=posixAccount),     vlvScope: 1
getgrent:      vlvFilter: (objectclass=posixGroup),       vlvScope: 1
gethostent:    vlvFilter: (objectclass=ipHost),           vlvScope: 1
getnetent:     vlvFilter: (objectclass=ipNetwork),        vlvScope: 1
getprotoent:   vlvFilter: (objectclass=ipProtocol),       vlvScope: 1
getrpcent:     vlvFilter: (objectclass=oncRpc),           vlvScope: 1
getaliasent:   vlvFilter: (objectclass=rfc822MailGroup),  vlvScope: 1
getserviceent: vlvFilter: (objectclass=ipService),        vlvScope: 1

The Cost of Indexing

Although indexes improve search performance, they incur the following costs:

• Slower database modification.

  The more indexes you maintain, the longer it takes to update the database. This is especially true for substring indexes that cause the directory server to generate multiple index files whenever an attribute value is created or changed. For substring indexes, the number of index entries created is proportional to the length of the string being indexed.

• Additional system resources required.

  • Additional disk space

    The more attributes you index, the more files the directory server creates.

  • Additional memory.

    To run more efficiently, the directory server maintatins as many index files as possible in memory; thus, making a greater demand for memory space.

  • Increased disk activity.

    Maintaining indexes that are not frequently accessed creates indexes that might be minimally used and swapped to disk when more frequently accessed index files are paged from disk.