[ale] login slowdown with large number of user accounts

[David Ritchie]

The most common problem is caused with a SA comes up with the
brilliant idea to sort the password file alphabetically
by user name. The problem this causes is that the 'ls' command on most
Unixs is stupid in that it goes to /etc/passwd
over and over to get the UID -> name translation, even if it has
already seen that UID (i.e. no caching)... I saw a similar
problem with HP-UX where 'root' was many, many lines down into the
file. I would suggest sorting by user ID with the most number of files
being first in the sort order.... root/bin etc... strace/ltrace would
probably be useful here.....

-- Dave