Looking for reasons to consider the production release candidate of the InCommon metadata query service (MDQ)?
Here’s an in-use memory graph at the moment a university switched to using MDQ in its production identity provider servers.
In addition, a service provider reports: “We were able to switch to using MDQ. The service restarts in 5 seconds now versus 15 minutes.”
Using the production release candidate of the new metadata query service (MDQ) – also known as per-entity metadata – Identity Providers and Service Providers no longer have to download and pre-load the entire federation metadata aggregate at system start up. Instead of pre-loading and verifying all of the thousands of entity descriptors in the InCommon aggregate, your SP or IdP will only load entities on-demand.
Complete details and instructions are in the documentation on the wiki.