Windows xp roaming profile slow to load

Workstation: Give me information about file "A". Server: Here is the information about file "A". Workstation: Give me information about file "B". Server: Here is the information about file "B". Each time the workstation asks the server about a file, it waits for the response before moving onto the next one - a response that will take milliseconds to arrive. On a profile with hundreds or thousands of files, all of these ms waits add up to a significant amount of time.

Usually protocol designers try to avoid these kinds of delays by using a technique known as pipelining whereby the client would just keep asking the server requests irrespective of whether it has yet received a response to the previous requests. A pipelined system is slightly more complex since the client has to match up each response with the appropriate request, and this is why I've characterised the roaming profile system as a "lazy" implementation - Microsoft have unfortunately chosen the simple approach rather than the fast approach.

Ironically, the link has plenty of bandwidth and a profile consisting of a few large files will be copied across very quickly I measured around 90Mbps ; it is profiles consisting of many files which are the problem. Our recommendation was to limit the number of files in a profile as much as possible - use folder redirection where possible to ensure that files go directly to the server instead of into the roaming profile. Improve this question. Theomax Theomax 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Evan Anderson Evan Anderson k 18 18 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I need to investigate it further, but using a tool called space sniffer it seems to be indicating that chrome cache is taking up alot of space - but when I investigated the cache folder for my profile it wasn't alot. I think I might be confused as to where the copied files are located etc What could make the loading time into windows desktop vary from 10 to 30 minutes?

Surely it couldn't have been one days worth of temp files? What is the operating system? What are the counts of files and total bytes like for the problematic profile?

I thought that the use of roaming profiles had been discouraged a long time ago and that most sites don't use this feature. It helps me maintain client computers in a quasi-stateless fashion and allows for easy PC repairs technicians can just rip and replace with spares, re-image machines at their whim, etc.

It has its quirks, certainly, but I get very good use out of it. Blake Blake 1 1 silver badge 5 5 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name.

You could use a Windows client PC in this role, so long as more than 10 users don't try to connect to it at once and it doesn't get turned off. Alternatively, since you're already familiar with Samba you could put a low-end Linux machine out there hosting the roaming profiles in each office, and use something like rsync to copy the files back to the hub location for backup.

If you want to gold-plate the solution you could put a Windows Server machine into each office, replicate the roaming profiles share with DFS-R, and users would be able to move freely between all the offices.

To get the best experience possible from roaming user profiles, it is important to read all the documentation and plan your implementation thoroughly. This section presents best practices for using roaming user profiles.

With the fast logon enhancement in Windows XP when users change from a local to a roaming profile, it will take two logons on each machine for profile changes to be registered. This is because the user always logs on with cached credentials; therefore it takes one logon for the network to notice that the user has become roaming and the second logon to apply these settings.

To decrease initial logon time to a new computer, it is recommended that you redirect the location of the My Documents folder outside of the users roaming profile. The best way to do this is with Folder Redirection. If you don't have Active Directory enabled, you can do this with a logon script or instruct the user to do so manually. To ensure that Roaming user profiles work optimally, create only the root profile share on the server, and let the system create the folders for each user.

If you must create folders for the users, ensure that you have the correct permissions set. Make sure that you turn off Offline Folders for shares where roaming user profiles are stored. If you do not turn off Offline Folders for a users profile, you may experience synchronization problems as both Offline Folders and Roaming Profiles try to synchronize the files in a users profile.

Windows XP does cache profiles. On login Windows XP will check the last write time of ntuser. Here's a technote on it. You might want to check the ntuser. It might be different today but back in I got very specific advice from an MS guy to NOT use roaming profiles, with the primary reason being filesystem performance loads of small files specifically.

Folder redirection, application deployment, desktop lockdown, and living with the rest of the profile being different were advised to be preferable. I'd also think that even a cached copy must be checked against the master, and that's always going to introduce some additional latency too.

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Asked 11 years, 9 months ago. Active 11 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 14k times. Improve this question. LapTop 6, 18 18 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges. I don't have any docs or links but I believe that that the roaming profile is not a sync and instead a full copy at login and logoff. Perhaps someone will be able to confirm that. This can lead to some heinous delays if your users store large files in their profile-managed directories. I have a vague memory of the profile reconciliation behaviour changing in Windows , but I'm only find docs describing the new "merge" algorithm for logoff change merging see technet.

For kicks, I'm mocking-up the scenario in a VM right now just to see how it looks. Try disabling the antivirus on-access scan from scanning network locations i. Only scan the local drive , as that can introduce some serious performance issues.