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Date:      Tue, 5 Sep 1995 10:20:57 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        kallio@jyu.fi (Seppo Kallio)
Cc:        luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it, questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Why "finger" takes so long ?
Message-ID:  <199509051720.KAA23606@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <v01530520ac71e5c1ac28@[130.234.41.39]> from "Seppo Kallio" at Sep 5, 95 03:07:01 pm

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> 2:14pm@itu:~% time finger kallio
> Login: kallio                           Name: Seppo Kallio
> Directory: /export/lk/kallio            Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
> On since Tue Sep  5 14:12 (EET DST) on ttyp0 from zaphod.maccc.jyu
> No Mail.
> 0.249u 1.666s 0:32.25 5.8% 21+439k 1926+14io 0pf+0w
> 2:15pm@itu:~%
> 
> I have 1776 accounts but idle node, not many users yet.

For explicit fingers, you should up the size of your name cache.

The name cache hash size is calculated by adding maxproc to
vm_object_cache_max in vfs_subr.c.

The name cache size before reuse is dictated by the number of vnodes
currently in the cache, and the number of vnodes in the cache
prior to reuse is once again relative to maxproc.


Probably what is happening is that the directory is large enough
that the full set of directory entries in the home directory that
contains the users for your system isn't in cache all at once.

Basically you can bounce NPROC higher and this will effectively
increase the hash size and the number of vnodes in the vnode cache,
or you can divide your home directory so that all your users aren't
in one directory, or you can avoid the stat in the finger code and
hope that that is sufficient (probably won't be in your particular
case).

It's a generally good idea to have /home broken up into multiple
directories instead of running all the users in the same directory
in any case.

ie:	/home/u1/joe
	/home/u1/john
	/home/u2/tom
	/home/u2/ted
	...

Finger will only traverse a u1 or u2 directories worth of entries into
the cache at a time -- no help for a general finger, but a lot for a
specific one.


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



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