Auth speed: UW IMAP + PAM + Kerberos

[Andrew Laurence]

Hello all,

I'm trying to solve a puzzle.  We have a collection of UW IMAP servers 
which consult Kerberos for the user auth.  The older servers running 
RH72 or RH9 and UW2001 are lickety-split in doing this.   However, the 
newer servers (faster hardware) with RHEL-AS3 and UW2003 are much 
slower.  It's a comparison of 0.03 seconds to 2.5 seconds - the 
difference is quite dramatic.

It occurred to me today that the older machines link directly to the 
Kerb libraries, while the newer ones use PAM.  Is it absurd to consider 
that PAM may be causing a performance lag?

If so, are their known techniques for evaluating PAM/Kerb performance?

Thanks!

-Andrew

-- 
Andrew Laurence                      atlauren at uci.edu
Indirect Support Team                http://www.oac.uci.edu/~atlauren/
Network & Academic Computing Svcs.
UC Irvine

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