[Off Topic] Mysql system optimization to work with Freeradius

[A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk]

Hi,

> I have a problem with the authentication regarding the Radius with MySQL
> database.
> There are about 12k users who authenticate to 2 Radius servers and 1 MySQL.
> Accounting is done every 5 minutes and the IPs are in a PostgreSQL base.

a few things....you COULD keep with MySQL - in which case use of any of the many
MySQL tuning scripts out there is a good start - 12000 users/records is TINY.
even the basic my-small.cnf example database settings should suffice..ensure
your using the memory of your server effectively, 12k entries is no memory usage 
really. use InnoDB engine rather than MyISAM etc. 

OR just move everything to PGSQL - and ensure its tweaked (by default its a LOT
better but you still need to do some DBA work).

also, is your accounting 'live' or buffered/proxies to accounting VS and done 'out of band'?

if live, it could be the insertion/updates of accounting which is causing the 
radiusd processes to stall as the auths etc have to wait for threads to be dealt
with and cleared out of the way.  some use of more threads may also help here.

benchmarking is very very useful - might show that its the disk subsystem causing
part of the bottleneck. are you doign something like RAID5 or RAID10 in software?

alan