[Samba] slowness when using roaming profiles

[John H Terpstra]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Gareth Davies wrote:

Just want to comment on issues with roaming profile usage and to
highlight the comments made below.

Another user complained to me that profile loading was VERY slow and that
one user took over 10 minutes to log onto the network, during which all
other users experienced poor network performance.

Just FYI - the user in question had an Outlook PST file that was nearly
1 Gigabyte in size. PST files are stored as part of the profile!! Any
wonder this user had problems! Again, this is NOT a samba issue - it is an
artifact of how roaming profiles and outlook works, AND is a symptom of
incredibly poor network management if such situations are allowed to
develop.

Corollory:
----------
If you want to use roaming profiles (good idea!), then it is essential
that profiles be managed. It is also important that all desktop tools and
service be configured in such a way that the profile environment remains
manageable. A good way to enforce this is trough the use of mandatory
profiles (ie: ones that the user can not change). This prevents the
growth in size of the profile. Oh yes, it also forces the site to manage
the network more carefully.

- John T.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jacob Smith" <jacob at globalsat.com>
> To: <ahologounis at penguinnetworking.com>; <samba at lists.samba.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 4:23 PM
> Subject: RE: [Samba] slowness when using roaming profiles
>
>
> >
> > make sure that your users know that folders like there "Desktop" get
> > transferred every time they log on and off.  So if they have large files
> or
> > folders on there desktop it will severely slow things down.
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: samba-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-admin at lists.samba.org]On
> > Behalf Of ahologounis at penguinnetworking.com
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 11:18 AM
> > To: samba at lists.samba.org
> > Subject: [Samba] slowness when using roaming profiles
> >
> >
> > I am on a rh 7.2 machinr running samba. My clients are windows 2000 and
> > whn using locl profiles I experience quick log-ons and quicj log-offs.
> >
> > Whwn I flag the client for roaming profiles, it seems to take many minutes
> <snip>
>
> I had this problem before and it was down to Temporary Internet Files and
> E-mail.
>
> Make sure E-mail is stored on a network mapped drive, not in the profile,
> run a vbs that removes anything from people's desktops and puts it in their
> home directory.
>
> Outlook Express was our main culprit, every time an attachment is viewed in
> OE it's stored in Temp Inet files...so that gets huge fast.
>
> The profile gets copied to and fro every time a user logs on or off so make
> sure they are as small as possible.
>
> In the end we implemented a quota so if someones profile went over 10MB they
> couldn't log off, so they had to sort it out before they left.
>
> P.S. this is not a SAMBA related issue :)
>
> HTH
>
> Shaolin
>
> .: http://www.security-forums.com :.
>
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org