Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ENG.SUN.COM!cpj
From: cpj@ENG.SUN.COM (Chuck Jerian)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: in re:quipu as X.500 server
Message-ID: <8907041922.AA20583@sparky.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 4 Jul 89 19:22:54 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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I took a large list of names, and set up the QUIPU server discussed
in the earlier item.  This name server used over 1K of memeory per
name in the list, so that to store the large list of people and machines
that I made of everyone at Su, it used over 16M of virtual memory.
It seemed to reference almost 32M making this list, but freed 
about half of the total.  The data is organized as a giant linked list
within a level of the directory.  A search of the directory using the
ISO search mechanism which allows for 'x*y*z' causes the server to
violently page trash, as it references every page of this giant list.
An answer is sometimes forthecoming in a minute.  The QUIPU server
is better behaved for small sets of names.  

On the other hand gnu-grep can always scan this same list of data
using arbitrary regular expressions which are more powerful than 
those in X.500 in less than .3 seconds on a Sun4/260 with the
data represented as a text file.

This suggests to me that the most important issue in searching name
servers is the organization of data and the choice of algorithms,
those in QUIPU are terrible, much worse than text files and gnu-grep.
					--cpj