Maintaining Novell Edirectory; Improving Edirectory Performance - Novell EDIRECTORY 8.8 - ADMINISTRATION Manual

Maintaining Novell eDirectory

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For Novell eDirectory
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health check procedures and upgrading or replacing hardware when necessary.
This chapter covers the following maintenance topics:
Performance
• Section 16.1, "Improving eDirectory Performance," on page 491
• Section 16.2, "Improving eDirectory Performance on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX
Systems," on page 498
• Section 16.3, "Improving Bulkload Performance," on page 504
Health Checks
• Section 16.4, "Keeping eDirectory Healthy," on page 509
• Section 16.5, "Resources for Monitoring," on page 511
Hardware Replacements
• Section 16.6, "Upgrading Hardware or Replacing a Server," on page 512
eDirectory Recovery
• Section 16.7, "Restoring eDirectory after a Hardware Failure," on page 519

16.1 Improving eDirectory Performance

The most significant setting that affects eDirectory performance is the cache. In earlier versions of
®
NDS , you could specify a block cache limit to regulate the amount of memory that the directory
used for the cache. The default was 8 MB RAM for cache.
With eDirectory 8.5 or later, you can specify a block cache limit and an entry cache limit. The block
cache, available in earlier versions of NDS, caches only physical blocks from the database. The
entry cache, a feature introduced in eDirectory 8.5, caches logical entries from the database. The
caching of entries reduces the processing time required to instantiate entries in memory from the
block cache.
Although there is some redundancy between the two caches, each cache is designed to boost
performance for different operations. Block cache is most useful for update operations. Entry cache
is most useful for operations that browse the eDirectory tree by reading through entries, such as
name resolution.
Both block and entry caches are useful in improving query performance. Block cache speeds up
index searching. Entry cache speeds up the retrieval of entries referenced from an index.
The defaults for eDirectory 8.8 are listed below:
• If the server you are installing eDirectory on does not have a replica, the default is a hard
memory limit of 16 MB, with 8 MB for block cache and 8 MB for entry cache.
to perform optimally, you need to maintain the directory through routine
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