Debugging Windows 2008 (Roaming Profile) user logon

Question

I would appreciate some help debugging my windows 2008 profile service. Any domain account that logs on to my 2008 machine gets a +- 20 second waiting time on "user profile service"

I am using roaming profiles, they are around 8mb in size, and most folders are already redirected to a network share.

event log registers no errors, there is more than 1 network card installed, but I have the correct card listed as "primary"

Is there any way to increase verbosity of logging on specifically the "user profile service" ?

Regards

Jeroen

Because 20 seconds to load a roaming profile with redirected folders seems like a long time to you? — joeqwerty, May 14 '10 at 20:24
@Andrew yes, it's quite normal, I've yet to see a sub 10s network login on windows... — Hubert Kario, Jan 07 '12 at 19:43
Does it only happen on this particular server? Do the same users logging on to other servers/computers get faster logons? — Trondh, Sep 03 '13 at 10:19

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 15 '10 at 10:54

How long does it take for an account to logon that is not configured for a roaming profile?

You may want to try running a packet capture during one of the logons.

NetMon 3.3 download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=983b941d-06cb-4658-b7f6-3088333d062f&displaylang=en

You can also use Sysinternals Process Monitor to track activity:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

The user profile service (profsrv) will not show up directly in task manager. It is hosted under one of the svchost.exe processes. If you run Process Explorer and mouse over the svchost processes, it will display which services each is hosting. When you find the one for the user profile service, you can filter the Process Monitor output by that pid.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 04 '13 at 06:13

It is correct that no errors are logged, as this is not an error. It takes a few seconds generally to fetch a roaming profile from a network location and then load it. The transfer is done over windows file sharing and there is caching involved, so there is quite a bit of overhead and processing.

While the time you have mentioned isn't excessive, the thing to do in this case is check for network congestion (and choke points), poor workstation performance (sometimes a defrag is needed or something), and poor fileserver performance (disk access is slow, especially if the profile server gets slammed with a lot of simultaneous logins).

Debugging Windows 2008 (Roaming Profile) user logon

2 Answers2