[ale] login slowdown with large number of user accounts

[Mike Harrison]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009, dhhoward at comcast.net wrote:

> Folks, at my daughter's school we're seeing a huge slowdown in login 
> time on K12Linux/Fedora10 after we added 1050 user accounts (one for 
> each student). The server in question has only 100GB of hard disk space. 
> Any ideas as to what is happening? Could each user account be 
> automatically setting aside say 100MB of HDD storage resulting in no 
> more swap space or something like that? Is there a config file somewhere 
> that we could modify so that user accounts have less? Thanks, Daniel

Once upon a time, I used /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to auth several 
thousands of users on crappy hardware at an ISP.. No problems.

And the day my sysadmin installed the "quota" crapola, it crawled.
We removed it, and manually scanned directories at night for HD usage 
issues.

What do you see when you run "top" from a command line?
What's using the main process load?