Performance and Scalability Solutions

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is the world's highest performing virtual directory and LDAP proxy, evidenced by deployments at several large telecommunications companies and service providers. These are mission-critical environments involving thousands of protocol operations per second. In addition to its speed and scalability, existing deployments are streamlined by intelligently optimizing how applications access the directory and optionally caching data.

Solution

Dynamic and Large Groups

Dynamic groups are common in many deployments, but they are not without problems. They are convenient because dynamic groups are not configured by listing every group member in the group entry. Rather, they are automatically derived by checking whether an entry has a certain attribute set that determines its membership. Each time a dynamic group is checked for membership requires a search, degrading performance and severely impacting applications.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server supports intelligent caching of dynamic groups and membership with fast resolution, even with significant growth in the number of members. This has been demonstrated in tests involving millions of entries.

Benefits

Load-Balancing

Virtual Directory Server has extensive support for load-balancing on a per-operation basis, dramatically increasing performance in replicated environments. Its load-balancing is different than that provided by typical TCP/IP Level 3 load-balancing appliances. Instead of balancing connections over multiple servers, Directory Extender balances individual requests over different connection pools to different replicas, providing finer-grained load-balancing. Connection-based load-balancing does not take into consideration that different connections may have completely different load patterns.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server supports multiple load-balancing algorithms, including weighted algorithms, giving the administrator full control over load distribution to different servers.

Priority Levels

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server can assign a different priority to different requests. This can be used to accelerate processing of specific requests within Virtual Directory Server , or to prevent low-priority requests from interfering with more important traffic.

Caching

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server helps to cache queries that would typically resolve slowly. Although modern directory servers tend to be fast and efficient, there are instances where certain searches take a long time to run. Symlabs Virtual Directory Server fulfills these searches from the cache, providing a significant performance boost.

Intelligent Re-writing of Requests

Applications that do not make efficient use of directory infrastructure can lead to a range of problems. In mild cases an application might perform poorly or needlessly stress LDAP servers, or in worst-case scenarios cause an overload of LDAP infrastructure with repercussions felt enterprise-wide.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server detects and corrects inefficient searches, returning the desired results without causing excessive load or inefficient use of server resources.