AFP and Network Users: Tiger Server and Leopard Clients

[richardfarley]

Greetings.

We recently upgraded our clients to 10.5.2 while keeping our server at 10.4.11. The server is running AFP, OD, Firewall, iChat, NFS, and Web Services. It’s an XServe PPC with 8GB of memory running with 200 threads.

All of our clients are using network accounts with the home directory on a non-boot partition of the server. The number of simultaneous users can range anywhere between 6 and 20 during business hours.

After upgrading the clients, we noticed that two of the users’ activities were taking up an unexpectedly high percentage of the %CPU. It’s not uncommon for the CPU to run at >90% for up to 45 minutes after one of the users logs on. Looking at the AppleFileServicesAccess.log, it looks activity from Mail. There are a lot of entries which look like this:

IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “CreateDir 6” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “CreateFile IMG_0972.jpg” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “OpenFork IMG_0972.jpg” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “OpenFork com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “OpenFork com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “CreateFile com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents-journal” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “OpenFork com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents-journal” 0 0 0
IP 132.XXX.XXX.XX – – 20/Mar/2008:08:53:05 -0800 “Delete com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents-journal” 0 0 0

It’s not uncommon to see the “CreateDir” increment to 20. This is in addition to the more common entries you’d find in the log.

You can see in the sample I posted that the activity relates to a jpg. This sequence is repeated for when seems like all the attachments the user has. All of our users are using IMAP. To our knowledge, the two users “causing” these problems are using the same mail settings as all of our other users. While they are not our most active users of mail, they are two of the top four who have home directories on the server.

The activity of these two users is affecting the services provided to the others. In the morning, when these two users come in and login, the syncing of their mail slows down the whole department.

We’ve exhausted the literature and now are brainstorming. Does anybody have any ideas? Our immediate goal is to get the CPU under control. Preferably, we won’t put a band-aid on this. We don’t want to just switch Users A and B to local accounts.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

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