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> To argue for the OP, consider the case of passwd being parsed on every system call. That is simply sub-optimal.

passwd is not read every system call and anything that is read frequently is almost certainly in the fs cache.

I got about 3 assertions into the article before I decided I had enough of that bullshit.

Note that "read from disk" and "parsed" are two different things.

In any case I haven't heard of performance problems. I think these files are needed basically for logging in and when tools like "ls" convert UIDs to names.

If there were performance problems, something would be done. And you can easily switch to LDAP or your backend of preference.

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