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README.md
Turbo NSS
Turbonss is a plugin for GNU Name Service Switch (NSS)
functionality of GNU C Library (glibc). Turbonss implements lookup for user
and passwd
database entries (i.e. system users, groups, and group
memberships). It's main goal is to run id(1)
as fast as possible.
Turbonss is optimized for reading. If the data changes in any way, the whole file will need to be regenerated. Therefore, it was created, and best suited, for environments that have a central user & group database which then needs to be distributed to many servers/services, and the data does not change very often (e.g. hourly).
This is the fastest known NSS passwd/group implementation for reads. On a
corpus with 10k users, 10k groups and 500 average members per group, id
takes
17 seconds with the glibc default implementation, 10-17 milliseconds with a
pre-cached nscd
, ~8 milliseconds with turbonss
.
Project status
The project is finished and is not recommended for production; just use nscd.
Turbonss duly implements the full user/group API in src/libnss.zig
: feel free
to copy that.
Yours truly (the author) worked on this for about 7 months. And when this was finished it turned out that just slapping nscd on top of the existing NSS implementation is almost as fast as this.
Dependencies
- Stage1 of the nightly zig compiler.
- cmph: bundled with this repository.
Trying it out
Clone, compile and test first:
$ git clone --recursive https://git.sr.ht/~motiejus/turbonss
$ zig build -fstage1 test
$ zig build -fstage1 -Dtarget=x86_64-linux-gnu.2.31 -Dcpu=x86_64_v3 -Drelease-safe=true
One may choose different options, depending on requirements. Here are some hints:
-Dcpu=<...>
for the CPU microarchitecture.-Drelease-fast=true
for max speed-Drelease-small=true
for smallest binary sizes.-Dstrip=true
to strip debug symbols.
Test it on a real system
db.turbo
is the TurboNSS database file. To create one from /etc/group
and
/etc/passwd
, use turbonss-unix2db
:
$ zig-out/bin/turbonss-unix2db --passwd /etc/passwd --group /etc/group
$ zig-out/bin/turbonss-analyze db.turbo
<...>
Run and configure a test container that uses turbonss
instead of the default
files
:
$ docker run -ti --rm -v `pwd`:/etc/turbonss -w /etc/turbonss debian:bullseye
# cp zig-out/lib/libnss_turbo.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
And run the commands:
$ getent passwd
$ getent group
$ id root
More users and groups
turbonss-makecorpus
can synthesize more users
and groups
:
# ./zig-out/bin/turbonss-makecorpus
wrote users=10000 groups=10000 avg-members=1000 to .
# cat group >> /etc/group
# cat passwd >> /etc/passwd
# time id u_1000000
<...>
real 0m17.380s
user 0m13.117s
sys 0m4.263s
17 seconds for an id
command! Well, there are indeed many users and groups.
Let's see how turbonss fares with it:
# zig-out/bin/turbonss-unix2db --group /etc/group --passwd /etc/passwd
total 10968512 bytes. groups=10019 users=10039
# ls -hs /etc/group /etc/passwd db.turbo
48M /etc/group 668K /etc/passwd 11M db.turbo
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
# time id u_1000000
real 0m0.008s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.008s
That's ~1500x improvement for the id
command (and notice about 4X compression
ratio compared to plain files). If the number of users and groups is increased
by 10x (to 100k each), the difference becomes even crazier:
# time id u_1000000
<...>
real 3m42.281s
user 2m30.482s
sys 0m55.840s
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
# time id u_1000000
<...>
real 0m0.008s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.008s
Documentation
Architecture is detailed in docs/architecture.md
Development notes are in docs/development.md