[debianfoo]

Thanks Kevin.

Are there any benchmarks that actually quantify the performance benefit of LDAP? Internal from your group, or external on the web. I googled, but did not find anything compelling.

I understand the need for trying to conform to what most enterprises already have deployed, that was our reason for using LDAP also (when I worked in software dev). But now, I am just part of a small academic group looking at email solutions - and LDAP seems like one more thing to worry about. We already have many databases that we admin.

In my past life, I just recalled that it was one more system for admins to learn (if it was not already installed at an enterprise) - and indexing the user table in a RDBMS with an in memory cache at the app layer seemed to allow a simpler install and was more performant (for us). We were using iPlanet at the time - and had to monkey with getting the LDAP trees into memory anyway, in the end (because of performance problems).

Thanks again for clarifying this matter. I'm far from an expert in this area, and given all of the great work that your team has done, I assumed there was likely a good reason that you were using LDAP.