Everybody argue about something and usually its so difficult to come to a conclusion. Microsoft says windows is good, linux people say linux is better, I say FreeBSD is best :)
Anyhow the hardware is so fast and cheap nowadays that we dont need to be so efficient :) It is better to install things the most productive way. Usually it is enough...
By the way I would like to finish this with something which I think funny:
I just remembered something when I thought about efficient.
Microsoft always says the newer version of windows works faster and more efficiently etc. But yet they require faster cpu's and more memory in their system requirements :) When we leave the memory out, I wonder why a more efficient system require faster cpu :) there is a problem in this
equation :)
Evren
Peter Nixon wrote:
On Tue August 5 2003 06:37, Evren Yurtesen wrote:
Well, if that is such a big problem then you can do a memory disk and store your db files in memory disk. That would then definetely work better than freeradius itself. How much are the memory prices now anyhow.
You could. This again uses more memory, which was one of the things you said you save by using a DB. You can't have it both ways.
About the operating system stuff, the load of exchanging few messages in memory can not be so overwhelming compared to an inefficient search of a few hundred thousands of users from a text database even when its in memory already.
What is so inefficient about the search algorithm used by FreeRadius. (I have not looked currently) If is IS slow, then once again, we can simply use the "efficient" algorithm from MySQL instead of the one currently in use.
There so many programs running in background usually that I am sure that many programs trigger the kernel context switching already even when freeradius is searching from the users file. Now the point is if the search is faster then it would be interrupted less since it would take less time to finish. Thus using SQL would yet improve performance anyhow since the searches would take a lot less time.
You are again basing your arguement on the hypothesis that FreeRadius uses an incredibly inefficient algorithm to search though memory. It would literally have to be several orders of magnitude slower than the search algorithm used by MySQL for them to be _even_ in terms of speed due to disk/context switch/socket/parsing overhead. I simply don't believe that this is the case.
If you show me a benchmark that proves this, I will shutup about it, but what you are saying currently just does not make sense. Even if it were true, it would be very simple to fix it (ie. Copy the algorithm that MySQL uses into FreeRadius).
Look at some statistics http://cs.nmu.edu/~benchmark/index.php?page=context The context switching occurs in microseconds. Lets try to calculate how many context switching operations can be done in a second? Needless to remind that a microsecond is 10^-6 of a second.
Then think about how much difference would it take to search 100000 entries from users file in memory or in sql database. In which sql already optimize the data to be searched. Then find out how many context switching can be done in that much time :)
I am certainly uncertain about how much overhead it cause for freeradius to call to mysql and back but it can not be so much.
It is enough to make a difference :-)
Plus if you have 100000 users you do not want to reload the users file :) think about reading 100000 users from the disk. Now is that more efficient? in every stupid reload. Then calculate the people who change their passwords or new customers coming and new accounts added.
This is a seperate issue. We already agreed on this issue. I never told you otherwise.
You cant possible argue that using users file is faster.
I can and I am. If you are willing to provide benchmarks that prove otherwise then I will agree that you are right. (And probably rewrite the search algorithm in FR to make it faster :-) Until that time, what you are saying goes against common sense.
Its like saying that example B is faster than example A in the following scenario:
A) You need to call your girlfriend. You know her number, so you dial it and talk to her.
B) You need to call your girlfriend, You don't know her number so you call your secretary and ask her to look it up in the phone book. Your secretary looks up the number, calls you back and give it to you, then you call your girlfriend.
Which do you thing is faster?? Bzzzt. WRONG ANSWER. Just because the phone book has a great, wonderfully efficient index, and your secretary is very good at using it, doesn't mean that it's faster than having the number in your own head....
But perhaps the difference is so little when you have few thousand users that you can omit the difference.
Evren
Peter Nixon wrote:
On Tue August 5 2003 05:34, Evren Yurtesen wrote:
Thats totally wrong, so you say same cpu works on both db lookups and freeradius, now when freeradius is making a lookup inside users file which is in ram, the same cpu doesnt work on db lookups in memory or what? so thats out of question.
I am sorry to tell you Evren, but you ARE wrong. Even if you forget for a moment the fact that a DB server has to fetch the data from the disk and FreeRadius does not, It is MUCH more efficient for FreeRadius to search it's own memory space than to ask another program to supply the data.
Asking another program (A DB server or any other program) even if that program already has the data in memory is very slow comparitively as it forces a kernel context switch to load the other program onto the CPU, then another context switch to load FreeRadius onto the CPU.
Put simply you are wrong. Please read up about CPU design and operating system context switches before argueing this any more.
but mysql is optimized for that kind of lookups, there is huge difference. then again, you can increase the mysql memory cache that mysql can cache the whole db inside the ram if it is small enough.
It is not. There is not. You are wrong. Even if you have the entire DB inside ram (which would nullify your point of using a DB instead of a client file to save on RAM usage) the CPU still has to switch the running context from FR -> DB -> FR which flushes all CPU caches and is very slow. not to mention the fact that there is TCP (or UNIX) socket overhead to slow things down. Of course there is also Parsing and reparsing of SQL statements etc etc..
Now about searching in ram is better than using a database backend. I wonder why companies do not store their database data in text files and load them to ram :)
They do. Of course they do. It is always faster to load data at run time than look it up later. using a DB is easier/better for maintenence. It is NOT faster.
now the problem is that also everytime you reload radius it reloads the whole file since it cant know where the changed data is. Thus uses far more cpu.
this ONLY happens at startup. how can it possibly use more CPU than requesting from disk for every query???!!!
It is definetely not a good thing if you want your users to change their passwords from web, then you need to write to users file and reload radius if you do not use sql.
Yes. As mentioned before. DB is good for easy maintenence, NOT speed.
If you use sql you can create a user which can only change some parts of the database and limit the access. It is even more secure when configured properly. It is 100 times easier to write a php script which does that than writing it in c or perl
We were argueing about speed, not other issues. DBs are good, but you are VERY wrong about them being faster than a memory search of the clients file..
If case you were wondering I maintain the postgresql configs and driver for FreeRadius, and run a DB backend with many GB of data in it.. Trust me, I know what I am talking about more than you do :-)
Peter
Graeme Hinchliffe wrote:
On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:01:07 +0200
"Andrea Coppini" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
DB backends are good, and save alot of admin, but don't expect them to
be
faster than a memory scan :-)
I haven't done any tests, but I would presume an SQL backend would be more 'robust' than freeradius.
The way I see it, having 1 request a minute is definitely faster with a users file in memory, but when the load hits and you have 10,000 hits per minute, freeradius would grind to a halt having to look up the credentials and handling all NAS comms simultaneously, while freeradius + sql would just continue doing their respective jobs as normal.
But as the same CPU would be working on the DB lookups AND the
freeRADIUS code as well, it would slow down by a much larger factor. You would now have 2 processes sharing the memory and CPU resources and
bus of the system etc..
Fact is Disk access is horribly slow compared to memory.
Look at the spec of a fairly old (now) PC.. 100MHz FSB.. so thats around 100,000,000*4 bytes per SECOND which is a tiny bit faster than a HDD don't you think.
Just look at the clock speed of your PC.. even if the data wasn't indexed in memory and was searched in a linear manner it would still be extremely quick in comparison to a db.
Graeme
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