Over the past few months, we've done quite some tweaking at Mozilla Service to make our Python platform work well for the Sync platform. One bottleneck we have is the number of open connections we can have on a given LDAP server.

On very high load, we needed to make sure we could control the flow of open connections, and when possible reduce the number of connectors as much as possible, by recycling/reusing them.

python-ldap does not come with a pool, so we've built our own with the Ops team.
The pool keeps LDAP connectors alive and let you reuse them, drastically reducing the time spent to initiate a ldap connection.

The pool has useful features like:
- transparent reconnection on server restarts, or timeouts/downtimes - configurable pool size and connectors timeouts - a context manager to simplify acquiring and releasing a connector - configurable max lifetime for connectors

The max lifetime feature is useful when you add a new server in a pool of ldap servers: if the pool is already filled with connectors, a server you will introduce will never have a chance to get a connector.
We avoid this problem by introducing a max lifetime for our connectors: the pool gets fresh connectors after a bit of time and can access all our resources.

The pool is used via a context manager, and is recycled when you leave the with block:
from ldappool import ConnectionManager

cm = ConnectionManager('ldap://localhost')



with cm.connection('uid=user,ou=logins,dc=mozilla', 'password') as conn:

      .. do something with conn ..

I have extracted it from our code based and released it on its own at pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ldappool/

Let us know if you try it !