Redirecting Cache Folder
Hi everybody,
this solution applies only to network user accounts (Home folder on server) configuration and Leopard on Workstations.That doesn’t work with Tiger Workstations.
Safari, Firefox, MS Office, Pages etc… have a cache folder. This cache is in the User_Home_Folder/library/Caches located on the server. If you have a hundred users logged in on your server and using a web browser, their cache folder is being re-written non-stop with temporary files. This cache folder size increases with time. That creates heavy network communication between your workstations and server.
The solution is on page 13 of Leopard Server Quickstart. The goal is to redirect the cache locally on the user workstation.
In my case, CPU loads went from %130 to %20.
wan_quantum and wan_threshold
We’ve deployed the modified plist this morning to all of our clients, the server (AFP service) is running normal at 20% - 40%. But we have to keep an eye on it, i don’t think this is the final solution.
i think that this was part of the problem.
top ten
There are a number of possible workarounds for this, whose effectiveness range, until now we have no solution.
The top 10 are:
1. Setting AFP wan threshold
2. Turning off spotlight on server by marking AFP volume as private
3. Turned off Time Machine even though no backup volumes where defined
4. Set kern.maxfiles=200000 and kern.maxfilesperproc=5000 sysctl’s
5. Turned DS_Store off on both clients and servers
6. Turned off smb (windows samba) file server
7. Disabled auto-disconnect in AFP after idle time.
8. Removed spotlight indexing on all afp volumes and deleted .SpotLight-V100 directories on AFP volumes.
9. Verified that Host Cache Flushing is disabled on external RAID array.
10. Set the following default: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true. Set as preference for all groups.
11. Disabled kerberos for AFP authentication.
12. Changed the fibre topology to Point to Point for all 4 fiber connections to the Promise VTrak array.
13. Stop spotlight indexing by using the command: touch /Volumes/Sharename/.metadata_never_index
14. Renamed odpac.bundle in /System/Library/KerberosPlugins/KerberosAuthDataPlugins/ to odpac.bundle_DISABLED
15. volume with our home dirs has to keep at least 10% free for performance reasons