Shibboleth Developers

[Ian Young <>]

Reimer Karlsen-Masur, DFN-CERT wrote:

> (Or put the stuff into the meta data. But that does not scale.)

I'm not sure that adding more elements to the metadata for individual 
entities changes the scalability much (it's "just" a constant factor).

I think the real scalability issue is that we are relying on a 
monolithic representation of metadata as a single document at the 
federation level (with, I have to assume, corresponding in-memory 
representations).

Current federations haven't hit sizes where that's a real challenge, but 
obviously the situation won't get any better from here.  In the long 
run, we'll need to move away from a monolithic representation in the 
same way as the Internet moved away from a monolithic HOSTS file.  If 
entities only need to parse and cache the metadata for other entities 
they are in active communication with, the size of the individual entity 
metadata documents becomes much less important.

        -- Ian