Where has your LDAP connection pool gone?

You have deployed Oracle BPM and decided to run some load tests against it. You're concerned, among other things, about the behavior of your backend LDAP server under peak times, whether it's going to be able to handle the load or not. You check the security providers settings in Weblogic Server and see you have an LDAP Authenticator (or some specialization, like OVD Authenticator, for instance) with an ldap pool size set to 50 connections. But your test reveals that many more than 50 connections gets open in your LDAP server. You change that number, redo your tests, but the behavior doesn't change at all. Then you get worried about the LDAP connection handling performed by the Weblogic authenticator.

This post is to tell you, as far this scenario goes, there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, for this specific scenario, you're looking at the wrong place for your connection pool settings.

Oracle BPM, as well as SOA, WebCenter, UCM (Universal Content Management), IPM (Imaging Processing Management) and others use something called User/Role API to communicate with LDAP stores. Whenever these components need to assert a user identity or query user/group/attribute information, they go through User/Role API. It is an abstraction built on top of JNDI to ease the access to Directory servers. You can connect to any LDAP server supported by WLS authenticators and use the very same set of APIs to retrieve and write data without having to resort on JNDI, regardless of the LDAP server you connect to.