| >pwosf (advanced) server is considered as
>a domain controller for a 40000 user
>environment.
>
>the current version (6.1) is investigated
>by the customer, who has particular interest
>in the automated setup of the accounts
>database.
Please note that our product is positioned as compatible with a
Windows NT server. Microsoft doesn't support more than 10000
users per domain. I believe there is no hardcoded limit, but
performance degrades just as your customer has observed.
>1. question
>he currently adds user and creates home shares
>by shell scripts ("net add user ....").
>is there a better way ?
This is probably as good a way as any. You can add users through
the Windows NT User Manager for Domains utility, but since it is
the server that is doing the actual work, there is no performance
benefit for using the Windows app.
>2. question
>how does the accounts database scale ?
>he has found out, that at the beginning
>adding a user takes 1.3s, whereas it takes
>over 10s after he has populated 10000 users.
>how long will it take after 40000 populated
>users/shares ?
The database scales linearly. The time to add a new user is
dominated by the time it takes to update the hash tables in the
User Accounts database. If it takes 10s to update a database
with 10000 users, I would expect it would take 40s to update a
database with 40000 users. Note that the scale has some sharp
jumps in it, as the hash table size is doubled when the hash
table gets too full.
>3. question
>is the digital product an at&t port ?
>he is investigating a competitive product
>in addition (asx server from sni), which is
>an at&t port. asx failed to create more then
>32k shares due to an architectural limit
>(or bug in the port ?).
>is this true for the digital product as well?
Yes, the Digital product is based upon code from AT&T. I
expect the Digital Unix product to have the same limitations
around the maximum number of shares. The Digital VMS product
is also based upon code from AT&T, but they have substantial
changes to the share file code that allows them to support
many more shares than 32000.
The best recommendation I can give is to recommend that the
customer avoid the use of personal shares. Note that this
does NOT preclude the customer from having each user from
having a distinct disk area on the server. It just means
that each user has a sub-directory in some existing share.
By the way, I'm very curious about this customer. Most
customers don't have 40000 users. Could you tell us more?
Is this a university perhaps? Why do they want a share
per user? Thanks!
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