By default, the Sun Java System Web Server caches user and group authentication results in the ACL user cache. You can control the amount of time that ACL user cache is valid by using the ACLCacheLifetime directive in the magnus.conf file. Each time an entry in the cache is referenced, its age is calculated and checked against ACLCacheLifetime. The entry is not used if its age is greater than or equal to the ACLCacheLifetime. The default value is 120 seconds. Setting the value to 0 (zero) turns the cache off. If you use a large number for this value, you may need to restart the Sun Java System Web Server every time you make changes to the LDAP entries. For example, if this value is set to 120 seconds, the Sun Java System Web Server might be out of sync with the LDAP directory for as long as two minutes. Only set a large value if your LDAP directory is not likely to change often.
Using the magnus.conf parameter for the ACLUserCacheSize, you can configure the maximum number of entries that can be held in the cache. The default value for this parameter is 200. New entries are added to the head of the list, and entries at the end of this list are recycled to accommodate new entries when the cache reaches its maximum size.
You can also set the maximum number of group memberships that can be cached for each user entry using the magnus.conf parameter, ACLGroupCacheSize. The default value for this parameter is four. Unfortunately non-membership of a user in a group is not cached, and will result in several LDAP directory accesses on every request.
For more information on ACL file directives, see the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP12 NSAPI Programmer’s Guide.