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From: graichen@julia.physik.fu-berlin.de (Thomas Graichen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: long finger times
Date: 19 Jul 1995 08:31:38 GMT
Organization: Freie Universitaet Berlin
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Bill Paul (wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu) wrote:
: (graichen@sirius.physik.fu-berlin.de) had the courage to say:
: : can anybody tell me why finger is so slow under FreeBSD:
: : ...
: : -> why is it so very SLOW under FreeBSD - all three machines are standing
: : side by side on the same net - i think finger is't that cpu intensiv that
: : the i486/66 is to slow for it (or am i wrong ?) - thanks in advance - t
: If you have a lot of users on your machine, and if you use the automounter
: (or possibly just NFS in general) then the reason it's slow is because
: finger in FreeBSD up to 2.0.5 (which up until now was used exactly as
: distributed with 4.4BSD-Lite) was a little bit thick in the head. It has
: a barely documented and rarely used feature called a .nofinger file: if
: you create a .nofinger file in your account, you'll become invisible to
: finger. The problem is that finger was originally coded in such a way that
: it checked for a .nofinger file in _every_ _single_ _user's_ _account_
: whether it needed to or not. This can get very messy if you use the
: automounter to mount users' home directories from several different servers:
: a single finger request triggers the mounting of every single NFS
: filesystem.
: I remember seeing someone commit a fix for this not to long ago. You
: might want to try finger from FreeBSD-current to see if it makes things
: go faster. I don't know if the NetBSD people have encountered and/or
: fixed this yet.
i think - that's it exactly - exactly our configuration - i also wondered why
after a finger all the homedirs are mounted - that's now cleared :-) - i'll
check current and hope that it is fixed (or will be fixed) - because here it
causes the mount of about 20 !!! nfs dir's - that clearly leads to over 80
seconds (out net here is not the best at the moment) - how about fixing it by
using a parameter to fingerd in inetd.conf ?
thanks - t
_______________________________________________________||_____________________
__||
Perfection is reached, not when there is no __|| thomas graichen
longer anything to add, but when there __|| freie universitaet berlin
is no longer anything to take away __|| fachbereich physik
__||
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery - __||
___________________________||____email: graichen@omega.physik.fu-berlin.de____