1) How many groups can a user belong to and what sets the limit ?
2) How many groups can be defined, and what sets the limit ?
3) What are the performance implications of having:
a) many groups
b) many users in each group ?
I have seen when tracing NIS calls that the number of groups and
their size has implications.
ANSWER
R: I will answer your questions in the order they were asked:
1) How many groups can a user belong to & what sets this limit?
R) A user can belong to a maximum of 32 groups and this value
is hardcoded in the AIX operating system.
2) How many groups can be defined, and what sets that limit?
R) You can define an unlimited number of groups to the system
however in reality, the limit would be MAX_INT or 4 billion
group IDs.
There is how ever a limitation on the '/etc/group' file such
that each line can not be more than 1024 bytes in length.
This limit can be subverted by simply placing the group on
the following line and continuing the user list.
3) What are the performance implications of having:
a) many groups
r) In general, the bigger you make the list of groups, the more
the system will have to search. However the procedure that
does this is very fast and we could not discern any noticeable
performance difference between having few groups and many
groups defined to the system.
b) many users in each group
r) This goes back to the 1024 byte line limitation in the
'/etc/group' file which can be subverted. Other than
that we could see no performance difference.
I have talked with our communications people about the potential
effects of users and groups on NIS, and they felt that there
would be no more of a performance hit than would be experienced
in local group authentication procedures.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
USER GROUP LIMITS
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000070639 ITEM: RTA000070639
Dated: 06/1996 Category: ITSAI6000GE
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