[OpenAFS] Slowness in Dfs with an AFS client installed?

[Russ Allbery]

We just got a report from one of our users in the Graduate School of
Business saying that they'd tracked intermittant slowness in Dfs accesses
to whether or not a system had an AFS client installed.  The symptom is
that occasionally Dfs will respond immediately and occasionally it will
pause for up to 30 seconds before responding.  If the AFS client is not
installed, it always responds immediately.

They've tried with packages based on OpenAFS 1.4.0 as well as whatever
ancient thing we're currently distributing.  They have a test lab up and
are willing to help reproduce the problem to try to understand what's
going on.

Is this a known issue?  If so, is there a known solution or workaround?
If not, are there specific useful details that I can provide?  I'm happy
to either pass along instructions or to put people in touch with the user
in question.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>