Load times for Large Subnets

[Larry Apolonio]

Hello all,

I was wondering if there is a way I could speed up the startup time of
our DHCP server.

I've compiled 3.1.0 on a 64 bit RHEL 5 box.  I then created a dhcpd.conf
file which had 144 subnets with 410,000 available IP addresses for lease.
Next I used a program I wrote to create a lease file with 200,000 IP
addresses.  dhcpd -T quickly reported no errors, but service dhcpd start
took 15 minutes to start up.  This is an an AMD 3GHz box with 4 GB of
RAM.  The leases file was in tmpfs.

I also did this on an Intel box it took 20 minutes to start.

I looked this up on the web, and saw a reference to increase the hash
size.  I don't know what to edit and recompile.

Did anyone else out there have this problem?  Basically is there any way
to increase the startup time?  What do I lose if I increase the hash?

Thanks,
Larry Apolonio