speed of Net::LDAP

[Luke K. <luk...@bl...>]

Hi all.  I have some questions about perceived speed of Net::LDAP.  I
ran some quick comparisons between it and the command line, and am
willing to do more if anyone wants more info.

My problem is that Net::LDAP appears to be about an order of magnitude
slower for search operations than the corresponding command line
function.

For instance, I have an ldap database with 1768 ou's in it, and I
performed three different types of searches on it using both the command
line and Net::LDAP.  First I just dumped all of the entries to the
screen; then I built a hash of all of the entries, of the form
$hash{$dn}->{$attr} = $value.   Finally, I did another search and just
counted the entries.

For the command line functions, to dump to screen I just used system(),
to build the hash, I used open() and then match and split, and to count
I used open() and counted blank lines.

For Net::LDAP, to dump I did the search and cycled through the entries
with $entry->dump, to build the hash, I cycled through and used:
$dn = $entry->dn;
foreach $attr ($entry->attributes)
{
	$hash{$dn}->{$attr} = $entry->get($attr);
}

and for counting, I just did a $count++ for each entry.

For each Net::LDAP search I opened and closed the connection for each
time test.

Here are the numbers that I found:

Net: dump 21
Net: hash 14
Net: count 16
CLI: dump 2
CLI: hash 1
CLI: count 1

As you can see, Net::LDAP performed pretty abysmally.  My question is,
does everyone else see this too, and is it going to be addressed?  If
it's not going to be fixed, is Net::LDAPapi or Mozilla::LDAP any
better?  I really can't afford 20 seconds for all of my searches, so if
Net::LDAP is going to take that long, I can't use it.  And I want to
avoid the command line if possible, since I don't like the idea of
running long searches using the user's password on the command line.

If anyone is interested, I can send my code, or I can run more tests.  I
really would like to use Net::LDAP, since it is tons easier to use the
Net::LDAPapi, but I can't if it is going to be this slow.

Thanks, and please email me if you have any questions about my results.

-- 
Luke A. Kanies  | "Most people are born and years later die without
System Engineer | really having lived at all.  They play it safe and
615/778-7268    | tiptoe through life with no aspiration other than to
pgr 800/415-1972| arrive at death safely."-Tony Campolo, "Carpe Diem"