In article <199510231209.WAA18379@zen.void.oz.au>,
Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.void.oz.au> wrote:
> I've never used hesiod, but I'd assume that the passwd data etc would
> be kept in a zone used only for that?  The data transfered would not
> be too great.... you would only do the transfer on the first call a
> process makes to getpwent() and cache it all until the process calls
> setpassent().  

Many people who run Hesiod are large sites with tens of thousands of
users.  For ten thousand users, with protocol headers and whatnot that's
gotta be at least a megabyte to be transferred on the first call to
getpwent().  It just doesn't scale.