Topic: Slow logins - in fact slow everything

[sbryan]

Our SME system was supplied by a local company who are very supportive, but we are struggling with a coule of critical issues, the main one being the speed of the system.
We are a school and have up to 350 workstations on the network and over 1000 users registered.
Logins on the Workstations (XP and 2K) are noticeably slower than on our previous NT system.
Changes in users details in Server Manager are extremely slow - not uncommon for it to take 3 - 4 minutes to change a users group membership and always well over 1 minute to change a password often 2 minutes. We also feel that just being logged into the server seems to slow down the workstation.
I am not sure of the processor as this was supplied as a 'Black Box' solution but top shows all RAM used, which I guess is normal in LInux and not too much Swap happening, this has improved since the RAM was upped from 256 to 512.
My question is this: the proposed solution at the moment is to replace the box with a 3GHz P4 (I think the current one is an 800mHz something). Does this sound to more experienced users to be a likely cause of the issue?

[kokomi]

I haven't used SME for very long, but I can tell you that Windows Active Directory (which is MS's version of LDAP) is fairly processor intensive.  In fact, MS recommends that a domain controller be used for only a domain controller.  We have a MS domain controller which is an 800MHZ machine and we have the same problems. So I would assume SME would be the same.  Increased processor and, most important, increased RAM should help.
Just my windows point of view.

[angussf]

Our SME system was supplied by a local company who are very supportive, but we are struggling with a coule of critical issues, the main one being the speed of the system.
We are a school and have up to 350 workstations on the network and over 1000 users registered.
Logins on the Workstations (XP and 2K) are noticeably slower than on our previous NT system.
Changes in users details in Server Manager are extremely slow - not uncommon for it to take 3 - 4 minutes to change a users group membership and always well over 1 minute to change a password often 2 minutes. We also feel that just being logged into the server seems to slow down the workstation.
I am not sure of the processor as this was supplied as a 'Black Box' solution but top shows all RAM used, which I guess is normal in LInux and not too much Swap happening, this has improved since the RAM was upped from 256 to 512.
My question is this: the proposed solution at the moment is to replace the box with a 3GHz P4 (I think the current one is an 800mHz something). Does this sound to more experienced users to be a likely cause of the issue?

No, the problem is in how Windows XP's DNS intereacts with AD.  Google for "Windows XP"+"slow login".  While I'm just a newbie with SME Server, I've found I have to do two things to speed up WinXP's logins to either Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003.  First, set the first DNS entry to be the IP address of the server where AD is hosted, and second, disable the WebClient service.  M$ has a tech-note on why you need to disable the WebClient:

"You experience a delay when you use your Windows XP computer to log on to a domain or to connect to a network resource"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;832161

For more on which services you can disable to improve performance, see http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

The combination of these two should speed up WinXP logins enough that your (l)users quit whining so much

[angussf]

See also this:

How to write an Lmhosts file for domain validation and other name resolution issues
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q180094/

[sbryan]

OK, thanks for those references, are these issues likely to effect the speed of Server Manager as well as the logins?

[jackl]

sbryan

Check that all workstation clients are set to acquire an ip address from the SME server(dhcp) and you should be ok if the server is configured right. The active directory problems experienced when logging in to win2k/server2003 server is a different issue.
Increasing your ram and processor capacity can only help, even a badly configured server will run faster.
Check the type of hard disks that are in the system, a network of your size would run best on a scsi raid 5 setup. Slow older ata drives would be very slow in this environment, with several hundred users many simultaneous disk accesses and they can go to a crawl.
I would recommend at least a 1Gb of RAM in your case and a scsi disk sub system

Regards
Jack