Roaming Profile Issues

Roaming profiles are great! Well they are until, you start using shared or generic accounts and the users long on times slow right down.

Be very very very wary of using roaming profiles. Particularly if you use “generic or shared accounts” (an account logged in by more than one physical person at the same time)

You will end up with login delay issues, especially if they browse the internet, as cookies are build up significantly over time.

Assuming you have a wonderful high speed efficient network, there are still  two cases where roaming profiles will be slow

  1. on first login to a PC where the profile size is huge (100’s or 1000’s of MB)
  2. Continual slow logon due to a huge number (1000’s  of small files )

In one case I had an account with 20,000 cookies. The issue was not the size of the cookies, but the volume. The synchronisation process to a long time (15-20 minutes) to figure out what had changed (it’s copy on the local PC vs what was on the server)

Deleting the cookies significantly reduced the log in time…….until someone else who was still logged in at the same time using the same generic account logged off… then the 20,000 cookies were synced back up to the server… I logged in again and the performance issue was back!

The are two resolutions for this:

1. ban generic accounts

2. Find a User Environment Management tool such as Immidio Flex+. This enables you use local profiles and make only bits of the profile roaming that you want to roam



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