NetAuth uses a key/value system for storage. This allows the system to piggyback off of highly performant implementations of this concept via pluggable backends. One such implementation that is being introduced in the v0.5.0 release is a bitcask memory mapped storage option.
Bitcask comes with a few limitations, it is only suitable for operation on a single host, and really should be run from a local filesystem. It also can be damaged if you do not shut down your systems cleanly, so always make an effort to make sure you smoothly shutdown your servers when using the bitcask storage engine.
To enable the bitcask storage engine simply set the backend value in
the db section of your configuration file to bitcask. If you have
data already in another backend you can use a new tool to migrate the
data. The brand new nsutil (NetAuth Server Utility) can perform
offline tasks for your data storage option. Importantly it must be
run only when the server is stopped. To copy from one backend to
another, you can use the tool as shown below:
$ nsutil copy <source> <target>
To copy from the pre-0.5.0 default (filesystem) to the new bitcask
backend the command would look like this:
$ nsutil copy filesystem bitcask
In large deployments this should show a dramatic speed improvement,
and should also improve speed during system startup when in-memory
indexes are generated. The filesystem backend remains supported at
this time, and will not be removed in favor of the bitcask backend.
The new bitcask backend is not available on Windows builds.