Large leases file and long startup time

[John Hascall]

> Hello,
> 
> We're running DHCPd (currently 3.0.5) to serve a bunch of networks that
> are mostly static, some dynamic. At the moment, it's 431 subnets, 1762
> clients. We're currently using 3.0.5 with Masney's LDAP patch, but have
> been having some serious startup time issues - on the order of 5
> minutes. I did some investigation with static configs (compiled exactly
> from what's in LDAP) and the time is more or less the same. It appears
> that the bottleneck is reading the leases file, which is on the order of
> 2.3M on our production boxes (with only about 10% max of our clients
> active).
> 
> Has anyone else found similar issues? Is there any conceivable solution
> - reading the leases file from a database, or storing it in something
> more optimized than a text file?

I think your problem is other than your lease file size.
Ours is 20M and our startup time is about 5 seconds.

I would "trace" (ktrace/strace/truss/whatever it is called on your O/S)
dhcpd when starting to get clues (dns lookups?).

John