*BSD News Article 47193


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From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: long finger times
Date: 18 Jul 1995 14:52:19 GMT
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
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Daring to challenge the will of the almighty Leviam00se, Thomas Graichen
(graichen@sirius.physik.fu-berlin.de) had the courage to say:

: hello

: can anybody tell me why finger is so slow under FreeBSD:

[examples deleted]

: -> 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.

-Bill

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~T~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
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