db performance

[Arran Cudbard-Bell]

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.

-- 
Arran Cudbard-Bell (A.Cudbard-Bell at sussex.ac.uk)
Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting Officer
Infrastructure Services | ENG1 E1-1-08
University Of Sussex, Brighton
EXT:01273 873900 | INT: 3900