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Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 07:07:10 -0500
From: Tim Tsai <tim@futuresouth.com>
To: questions@freebsd.org
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: slow initgroups()
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We're seeing slow logins on a particular machine.  It frequently takes
10-15 seconds between the "Last login: ..." message until the shell prompt
appears.  This is a very lightly loaded Pentium Pro-180 with 128 megs of
RAM.  A nearly identically configured machine does not exhibit this
behavior.  I've traced this to the initgroups() call in /usr/bin/login
but I am not finding anything obvious.  A simple ktrace shows nearly
identical paths.

Both machines are NIS clients to the same NIS server.  What would cause
one to be much faster than the other?  The slow machine seems to have a
lot more Ierrors from "netstat -I" (about 1-2%) while the faster machine
has zero Ierrors.

A simple "ypcat group" and "ypcat group.bygid" on both machines yield
similar performance.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Tim