Query about Roaming profiles in an NT 4 domain

[bhogaj31]

Hi there

Environment is as follows -

Windows 2000 Pro, SP4 in an NT4 domain.

Users have a roaming profile and a system policy in place to delete locally cached profiles when he/she logs out.

When the users log in for the first time in the morning there is a bit of a delay while the profile is copied to locally from the network share, which is acceptable.

When the users log out there is also a bit of a delay as the profile is copied back up to the network share and deleted from the local machine.

My users complain that the machines are very slow all day long. So I disable the roaming profile for one of them and made them use a local profile which does not do any copying back and forth.

Now the machine is lightening fast at logon/logoff because there is nothing to copy up or down. This machine is also lightening fast all day long. If I re-enable the Roaming profile it slows down through out the day.

What is it trying to do during the day when a roaming profile is enabled???

Any ideas.

 

[pvanos]

Couple of things to try:
1)Make sure that folder My Documents is located on a share on some server.
This is by default located in the profile, which can then grow very big.
2) Same for pop3- mailboxes like Outlook Express, that are kept within a folder in the profile.
Also you might want to turn off in Internet Explorer, Tools>Internet Options...>Advanced : click on "Empty temporary internet files folder when the browser is closed".
3) Also manually delete any Temporary internet files and Cookies.

 

[bcastner]

Consider redefining what is included in the profile as a roaming profile:

. redirect My Documents folder. There is no reason to "roam" this, it should be on a redirected network share.

. redirect Temporary files, especially as Forum member pvanos noted the Temporary Internet folder. There is no reason to roam this. You can make them local filestores and as IE to delete them when exiting. Or redirect to a network share for that user.

. do not roam users that never need to roam.

. do not roam user data stores. They should be on a mapped network share.

In short, the "roaming" portion of the user profile should be small, lean and efficient. The user data, even temporary data, should not be included in the roam.