Tray Tracker causes unnecessary authentication traffic

[GoogleCodeExporter]

While investigating the cause for abnormally high load on our authentication 
backend, it turned out a single machine out of a large pool of CI servers was 
responsible for over 80% of LDAP traffic. This was traced back to a development 
team using Tray Tracker.

A cursory read of 
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Authenticating+scripted+clients 
suggests that this is a direct result of Jenkins' remote API not using 
authentication sessions, i.e. each API request from Tray Tracker translates to 
one or more LDAP search and bind requests. It also appears the solution would 
be to support API tokens in addition user+password authentication.

We are not alone with this issue: 
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-10341

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 30 Sep 2013 at 10:39