[OpenAFS-win32-devel] Experiences with new AFS releases

[Jeffrey Altman]

Ted Anderson wrote:
> I wanted to report on my experiences running the new OpenAFS releases.
> I installed 1.5.10 a few days ago because it was the recommended release
> for Windows users (I am running W2K+SP4).  While it seemed to work okay,
> I noticed that it was very slow on some things.  Some causal
> measurements suggested that stat'ing each file was taking about 1/3 of a
> second.  So "ls -l" in a directory containing 200 files was taking about
> a minute.  The previous version of AFS (1.4.1) was not nearly so slow.

1.4.x does not contact the file servers for locks.  1.5.x does.

Perhaps its not the FetchStatus RPC which is being sent to the file server?

Of course, the way to determine which is actually going on would be to
either obtain a network trace or capture debugging logging information
as per the instructions in the OpenAFS for Windows Release Notes.


> Next I figured I should try the latest stable release: 1.4.2a.  

Using which installation package:  MSI or EXE?  MSIs cannot be used
for downgrades.  You must perform a complete uninstall first.

That could be one of the problems.

> However,
> I was not able to get it to work at all with my home cell.  I did have
> some results with a different AFS cell on the same VPN and was also able
> to access /afs/openafs.org.  I don't know what is different about my
> home cell, but all attempts to access it lead to hangs and I could not
> stop the OpenAFS Client Service.  

Did you obtain a trace log?

What about a minidump at the time the service would not shutdown?

> It required an uninstall and an extra
> reboot to clean it off my system.  The event log contained many AFS
> messages during startup, several of which mentioned KfW.  I do not have
> this package installed, so perhaps the logic to handle the case where it
> is unavailable is not working.

If you told us what the messages were, perhaps we could tell you what
they mean.

> After a few hours of rebooting, installing and uninstalling, I was able
> to get the old AFS reinstalled and the performance is back to what I am
> used to.
> 
> I can provide excerpts from EventLog, output from the tests I ran or
> other details about my system or environment.  Let me know what would be
> helpful.
> 
> Ted Anderson

Bug reports should be sent to openafs-bugs@openafs.org.  Please send a
report of your issue along with debugging data so that we can identify
the cause of your issues.

End user queries for community assistance should be sent to
openafs-info@openafs.org.

Jeffrey Altman