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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199509051702.KAA23558@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: Why "finger" takes so long ?
To: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 10:02:41 -0700 (MST)
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199509051019.MAA01060@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> from "Luigi Rizzo" at Sep 5, 95 12:19:03 pm
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> One of our systems has some 600+ account on it. "finger" takes some 20
> seconds to run, and most of the time is spent waiting for something, as
> the output of "ps -augl" shows:
> 
> 7834 11468  7891   2  -6  0   344  640 biowai D    p5    0:01.42 finger cssip
> 
> Note that re-running the same command does not give any performance
> improvement.
> 
> At the moment, the system is mostly idle (two active users), has 16M RAM, no
> X active, and top shows the following:
> 
> Memory: 5508K Active, 680K Inact, 2704K Wired, 1468K Cache, 3808K Free
> Swap:   66M Total, 62M Free, 6% Inuse  
> 
> Any ideas on why it takes so long ? This is something I always
> experienced on this system, since the feb.95 snapshot.

Finger looks up the user's directory; basically, it looks up the home
directory as a file name.

So it's looking up a directory entry in a directory 600 entries deep
for each user currently on the system (for a non-explicit finger).

There was a patch to finger that rolled by on the list to prevent it
from doing this sort of thing.  Of course with gnu-finger (if that's
what you are running) you are screwed because of the need to look for
.nofinger, etc. in the users home directory, and no patch is possible.

If you are running the standard finger, check the list archives for
the patch (I didn't save it).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.