Roaming Profiles

[PCBrandon]

I have a Windows Server 2003 box that hosts around 1400 complete roaming profiles in an Active Directory environment.

The problem we're experiencing is increasing load times when logging into a system. It can take anywhere from 5-25 minutes to load a profile. Granted, some of these profiles are several gigabytes in size.

I ran a performance monitor on the box hosting the profiles all day and it never dropped below 500 MB of memory free, averaging around 650 MB free. CPU usage rarely went above 20%, averaging around 5% usage.

However, sitting idle it handled around 2 packets, during the day it would go to around 5000-9000 packets.

Is there a way that I can configure the workstations to "cache" a copy of the roaming profile? For example, if someone were to log into a new computer with a several gigabyte profile, it would take a considerable amount of time to copy all that data to the system. When the user logged off, it would ONLY copy the changed files to the remote profile. Then, should the user come back and log into the same system again, it wouldn't take long because it would only download the changed files from the previous log on rather than the whole profile again.

Thanks!

[mairving]

I don't know of a way to cache them. What I would do is to reduce their size. Setup a network share for their files, disable saving to the desktop and redirect their My Docs to the network share. You also need to be very careful since they are probably downloading music/video, some of which might not be legal which can get your company in trouble.