InCommon metadata support

["Cantor, Scott" <>]

On 2/18/16, 10:19 PM, 
"
 on behalf of Jeffrey Eaton" 
<
 on behalf of 
>
 wrote:



>I believe that there is value in having a metadata file which contains the 
>non-global set of entities.  An SP which is not published in the eduGAIN 
>metadata (and is therefore unknown to non-InCommon IDPs) has no need to load 
>those IDPS.

What happens when the size of that particular aggregate is also large enough 
to trigger a similar expansion of processing requirements? I don't think 
there's a good solution here that involves continuing down this path.

I also tend to think this is really a requirement for custom aggregates. That 
particular criterion just happens to be one example. One person's obvious use 
case is another's niche of little value.

>Other than being a waste of resources, there’s probably no real concern.  
>That said, consider every SP out there that’s loading and parsing the full 
>metadata file, containing a ton of SP metadata which is completely useless, 
>and potentially thousands of IDPs which aren’t useful if they’re not part of 
>the global federation.  Why waste hundreds of megabytes of RAM and the CPU 
>cycles when it’s not substantially harder to publish multiple metadata 
>files?  

It's possibly not as easy as you think, the signing process is not online or 
automatic to protect the key, but ultimately not for me to say.

It is exceedingly unfortunate that the OS with a correctly functioning heap 
model is Windows, I'll give you that.

-- Scott