Implementation Guide › Performance Tuning › Data Tier Performance › User Store Capacity Planning › How to Estimate a Sustained User Directory Search Rate › Use Authentication Guidelines to Estimate Directory Searches › Case 1: User Authentication and Directory Requests

Case 1: User Authentication and Directory Requests

A company has:

• Deployed one user directory for their banking application.
• Completed a capacity planning effort. The results of which show that users create an authentication load of 88,000 logins.

The company uses the following formula to begin estimating the number of requests the Policy Server sends to the user directory to service the authentication load:

authentication_load * 2 * number_of_user_stores = requests_for_authentication

• authentication_load

  Specifies the number of daily authentications for the application.

  Note: Two (2) is a constant. Authenticating a users results in two requests. One search to identify the user and one bind to verify credentials.

• number_of_user_stores

  Specifies the number of user stores in the implementation.

• requests_for_authentication

  Specifies the number of user directory requests that the authentication load creates.

Result: 88,000 * 2 * 1 = 176,000 requests.

The company uses this estimate to determine the total number of user directory requests required to service the daily authentication load.