Man thanks to all you folks for all the info. Let me elucidate my situation a bit, the organization where I am currently employed is split into factions. The faction I run is heavily OSS friendly , the application development/ DBA faction is not! I have deployed freeradius with mysql backends in the past with great success (100K users etc.) but the current people being insecure prefer to fork out 50K euros / year for oracle RAC licenses instead of looking into an "unsupported" platform What I need is proof positive that mysql / postgresql is at least as good as oracle for a radius DB. Again thanks. BTW , I have been using freeradius for a number of years , I would like to thank the developers for an awesome product Arran Cudbard-Bell wrote:
Alan DeKok wrote:
Angelos Karageorgiou wrote:
Has anyone had the time to do a DB performance comparison for heavily loaded freeradius servers ?
If your server is busy enough to be heavily loaded, you need multiple machines to maintain quality service. Once you have multiple machines, DB performance matters a lot less, because the load is spread across multiple machines.
For DB specific issues, look for DB performance on google. PostgreSQL usually has better performance than MySQL. The application using the DB (radius, web, etc.) has very little effect on DB performance.
However if you do choose to use MySQL, setting up query caching properly will have a huge (positive) impact on performance.
Same data being read out of the database four times, per authentication session ....
Clustering is a good idea too, though it's not a good idea to run an SQL server / SQL cluster node / LDAP directory server on the same box as FreeRADIUS as it will almost always have a negative impact on performance.