After successfully logging in, getting the GNOME session started takes quite a long time.
I have tried to debug what I can using wireshark etc to look for obvious signs of congestion or network configuration problems, but nothing pops out.
Then again, logins for non-networked users aren’t much faster, so I doubt it has something to do with the network authentication setup per say. But a lot of time passing for no apparent reason does seem like network problems of some kind to me.
I was wondering if there is gnome session log, perhaps the syslog somewhere, I could follow live to better see where the bottlenecks may be.
Oh, and yeah, when I log in via SSH in a terminal I get prompt instantly, no lag, also with networked users.
This smells like classic NFS + GNOME startup pain rather than pure LDAP auth.
The key detail is SSH login being instant while GNOME session is slow - that basically rules out auth as the main bottleneck.
GNOME hits a ton of small files in $HOME during session init (dconf, cache, extensions, etc). If your home is on NFS, latency kills you there. CLI doesn’t care, GNOME does.
There’s also a known issue in newer GNOME (48.x) where some user services timeout badly on network-backed homes -localsearch-3. service is a common offender. Masking it can reduce startup delay significantly.
Things I would try:
systemctl --user mask localsearch-3.service
move XDG_CACHE_HOME and maybe XDG_CONFIG_HOME to local storage
make sure your NFS mount uses automount and doesn’t block login
check journalctl --user-b for timeouts (you’ll probably see 30s+ gaps)
Also worth checking if anything in NSS/LDAP is doing slow lookups (especially DNS), but given SSH is instant, I’d bet on NFS latency + GNOME services timing out.
Seen very similar behavior on Debian testing with NFS homes - GUI takes minutes, SSH is instant.
Thanks, this seems like a plausible theory and sensible things to try.
How much will it affect the user to have different CACHE between machines? The idea was for all users to have all their settings intact across workstations.