Hello Managers,
Very Much Thanks to Peter Wolfe (wolfe_at_unx.dec.com) of
UNIX Systems Management Engineering, Digital Equipment Corp.
The good news is that there is an easy "fix" that works
for my situation and may help others.
His rapid response was right on target. The fact that we
have 2400 user accounts on our AlphaServer 2100 is the
main reason the current implementation of the dxaccounts
GUI takes so long to startup. Also, the C2 Security that
we run may also contribute to the slow startup time. As the
number of user accounts goes up, the startup time grows
exponentially. Peter indicated that the problem has been
fixed in the next major release of Digital UNIX, and that
even if you have 10,000 user accounts, dxaccounts will
startup in just 24 seconds. He does not know yet if a
patch for the current DU 4.0B will be made available or not.
In the mean time, all you have to do is put two lines that
specify a couple of resources into either the file
/Dxaccounts or the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Dxaccounts.
Here are the two lines:
*.dragInitiatorProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE
*.dragReceiverProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE
By putting these two lines into our /Dxaccounts file, we changed
our startup time at a remote workstation from 16 minutes to less
than 4 minutes. I can live with that kind of wait.
Below is Peter's in-depth explanation of what is going on, and
after that is a copy of my original post.
Paul Youngblood
University of Alabama in Huntsville
youngbloodp_at_uah.edu
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Detailed Explanation
**************************************************************
The problem is one that we aware of in V4.0 but didn't have time to fix.
We just fixed it and and the fix will be in the next major release of
Digital UNIX. It's a large change so it's not clear at this point
if we can get it into a patch kit.
The root of the problem is CDE/Motif's drop-site registration and
keyboard traversal. You can drag and drop a user icon to a group icon
and vice versa. That menas that each icon is registered as a valid drop site.
The problem is that as you add each new drop site Motif does a linear
search of the existing drop site list. It does the same thing for keyboard
traversal. For the next release we changed the code to
not do per-icon drop site registrations at all. We have to handle all the
drag over/drag under effects manually and also manually calculate the proper
drop site based on the x,y of the drop. There was actually a lot of other
issues/cleanups, but this is the gist of the performance improvements.
It's a lot more code but the good news is that the performance is order of
magnitude better. Our startup time for 10,000 users is now approximately 24
seconds (this is for base security. I don't have a C2 number handy).
For V4.0 this took over an hour.
I haven't tried this personally, but if you don't use the drag and drop
feature you can use a resource to disable it. This might bypass the
performance hits of the per-icon drop site registration. To do this, specify
the
following resources:
*.dragInitiatorProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE
*.dragReceiverProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE
For example, you can run dxaccounts using the following syntax:
dxaccounts -xrm "*.dragInitiatorProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE" \
-xrm "*.dragReceiverProtocolStyle: DRAG_NONE"
or simply place these resources in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Dxaccounts
or /Dxaccounts. Please let me know if these resources help you out .
pete
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Original Post:
**************************************************************
Hello Digital UNIX Managers,
I am running DU v4.0B with patch kit 2 on an AlphaServer 2100.
All file systems are AdvFS, and we run the C2 Security option.
This 2100 has 128 Mb of RAM. It functions as an email server,
never has more that 40 users logged on simultaneously, and runs
no user applications, compilers, or anything else. It is just
an email server - most people log in to check their mail with
pine, with a very few using the POP server software that it runs.
My problem is with the Account Manager GUI, dxaccounts.
Once invoked, it literally takes a full 7 minutes for this GUI
to appear at the console. If I invoke it from a remote workstation,
it takes 16 to 20 minutes to appear! Before we installed the patch
kit from Digital for this version of Digital UNIX, the problem was
MUCH, MUCH worse. Swap space seems fine during this time, so I
don't think that is the problem. Does anyone have suggestions on
how to speed up the startup time for this GUI ??? I will
certainly summarize.
Paul Youngblood
University of Alabama in Huntsville
youngbloodp_at_uah.edu
Received on Fri Apr 11 1997 - 05:27:14 NZST