Very slow login and incomplete disconnect

**jhill326** · February 2nd, 2006, 06:41 PM

Using a G4 Xserve w/ 2GB RAM DP. LDAP is setup and AFP and Open Dir. are running. Each student user upon login mounts their home directory and a folder called Groups and another called applications (these are hidden via workgroup manager/ workgroups/ Preferences/login items). This means that each user upon login creates three connections as seen in Server Admin/AFP/Connections. So when 100 users are logged in we show nearly 300 connections and the we get VERY SLOW. Apple File services often are running at over 100% in activity monitor. To compound the problem when users log off they fail to make a clean disconnect. In fact I have seen a workstation shut down and plug pulled out yet server admin still shows the connection, is called disabled/asleep but it is still an active connection.

I am really catching it from administration, the Novell box worked sooooo much better. Please help with suggestions.

Thanks

**Go3iverson** · February 2nd, 2006, 10:10 PM

Under what version of Mac OS X Server are you seeing this?

You really are putting a great deal of load on that one machine!

**sourcehound** · February 4th, 2006, 12:24 AM

Originally Posted by jhill326

Using a G4 Xserve w/ 2GB RAM DP. LDAP is setup and AFP and Open Dir. are running. Each student user upon login mounts their home directory and a folder called Groups and another called applications (these are hidden via workgroup manager/ workgroups/ Preferences/login items). This means that each user upon login creates three connections as seen in Server Admin/AFP/Connections. So when 100 users are logged in we show nearly 300 connections and the we get VERY SLOW. Apple File services often are running at over 100% in activity monitor. To compound the problem when users log off they fail to make a clean disconnect. In fact I have seen a workstation shut down and plug pulled out yet server admin still shows the connection, is called disabled/asleep but it is still an active connection.

I am really catching it from administration, the Novell box worked sooooo much better. Please help with suggestions.

Thanks

A Novell Server isn't even capable of working in the same scenario for hosting mount records for group folder and network home directories without schema modifications to eDirectory and additonal mount records and NFA tweaks to the Netware server. And if were to work in that scenario, no Netware admin in their right mind would put that much stress on an eDirectory server, and would certainly cluster the file services. An Xserve G4 with 4 gigs of RAM could easily handle this load. My advice would be NOT to automatically mount the Group folder through login items, but to put an alias of it on people's Dock to be mounted ON DEMAND with the Kerberos ticket from OD. That would cut out 100 or so persistent connections. Also, AFP doesn't immediately disconnect sessoins due to auto reconnect tokens. If you want this to work, you'll need to make changes to com.apple.afpserver.plist manually on the server. Otherwise, you'll need more beef. AFP ain't a lightweight protocol. If you need to discuss, you may track me down. I'm easy to find.

**sourcehound** · February 4th, 2006, 09:54 AM

I just realized I said Xserve G4 with 4 gigs of RAM, what I meant was XserveG5.

Originally Posted by sourcehound

A Novell Server isn't even capable of working in the same scenario for hosting mount records for group folder and network home directories without schema modifications to eDirectory and additonal mount records and NFA tweaks to the Netware server. And if were to work in that scenario, no Netware admin in their right mind would put that much stress on an eDirectory server, and would certainly cluster the file services. An Xserve G4 with 4 gigs of RAM could easily handle this load. My advice would be NOT to automatically mount the Group folder through login items, but to put an alias of it on people's Dock to be mounted ON DEMAND with the Kerberos ticket from OD. That would cut out 100 or so persistent connections. Also, AFP doesn't immediately disconnect sessoins due to auto reconnect tokens. If you want this to work, you'll need to make changes to com.apple.afpserver.plist manually on the server. Otherwise, you'll need more beef. AFP ain't a lightweight protocol. If you need to discuss, you may track me down. I'm easy to find.

**Whitehill** · February 5th, 2006, 08:15 AM

Open Workgroup Manager, select LDAP directory, click on Users (head icon), click on any user in the left pane, then click the Home tab in the right pane. You should see a list of directories, mounted or mountable, that can be the mount point parent of the user's home directory.

Apple told me that ideally this list should have one entry, at the most two or three. These are the directories that have to be mounted for network logins. If you have lots (say, one for each user, like I had), login becomes very sloooooooow.

I cut my mount points back to the one entry afp://server.home.net/Users and ... problem solved.

**Go3iverson** · February 5th, 2006, 12:13 PM

Originally Posted by Whitehill

Open Workgroup Manager, select LDAP directory, click on Users (head icon), click on any user in the left pane, then click the Home tab in the right pane. You should see a list of directories, mounted or mountable, that can be the mount point parent of the user's home directory.

Apple told me that ideally this list should have one entry, at the most two or three. These are the directories that have to be mounted for network logins. If you have lots (say, one for each user, like I had), login becomes very sloooooooow.

I cut my mount points back to the one entry afp://server.home.net/Users and ... problem solved.

What your saying is true, but is probably not what the OP is seeing. The OP states that they're doing automounts via WGM, not multiple home directories per user. He has 700 users being served from this one machine, with theoretically, 2100 AFP connections, on a G4 with 2GB of RAM, if everyone is logged in at once.

At the very least, having multiple replicas at the site will help share the load of the directory service portion. Ideally, you make them all part of the same OD domain and Kerberos realm, allowing you to move shares to different machines. Also, hopefully your not doing all of this on internal drives!

**jhill326** · February 6th, 2006, 09:11 AM

We are running 10.4.4 server. Though we have 700 users with home directories there are only about 250 workstations available to these users. Max. number of connections I have seen is 287 as observed via Server Admin. The server has 2 HD's. #1 has 80 GB and holds the OS, Drive #2 has 250 GB and holds the user home directories and network based application folder. DNA is currently provided by an off site server. We hope to use an older G4 (450 mhz 1gb RAM, 1000mhz ethernet) as a local DNS server soon. Could this machine be used to off load some of the tasks being performed by the G4 xserve maybe play host to the applications folder?

Thanks for your help. We are a small K-12 school in upstate NY. I am the Biology teacher as well as the PowerSchool Data person and now the SYSOP so if my questions seem ill informed it is because they are