Long Key Performance

David Shaw dshaw at jabberwocky.com
Fri Apr 19 21:32:01 CEST 2002


On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 11:07:00AM -0700, Anonymous wrote:
> It seems really weird to me that the gpg team has decided it's somehow
> sinful for people to use long keys.  If they want to, why not let
> them?

GnuPG does let them.  It asks that they consider what they are doing
first, but then lets them do whatever they want.

> 3. The key database is extremely slow.  On my machine it seems to
> search only 150 keys/second or so.  It's somewhat amusing that long
> keys are considered a serious performance problem, but retrieving keys
> off the disk is apparently not.

It was considered a serious performance problem.  1.0.7 has a brand
new trust database that's extremely fast.

Let's try and drag this back to what the actual problem is.  You want
GnuPG to be able to make big keys - no problem, it can.  You want
GnuPG to be able to use big keys - no problem, it can.  It seems you
just don't like the wording of the warning message.

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw at jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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   "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
      We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson




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