I'll start by stating that it's been ages since I've done anything with
Windows in a professional setting...so take this all with a large helping
of salt.

>Each profile runs to to about 100 MB each;

Are these roaming profiles, or a generic logon profile?  Are these files
stored in a central location that could possibly be mapped as a network
drive (or maybe they already are)?  You can redirect most of the profile
folders to point directly to a mapped drive, which would prevent the data
copy on logon, excepting things like desktop wallpaper (again, it's been
awhile, but I believe things like wallpaper have to be cached locally).  By
moving the profile to a network location, you can also keep the application
print drivers in the remote profile.  No guarantees this will work, but I
would think it's worth a try, at the very least.

If this works for you, it should drastically improve logon times.  It will
slow down individual transactions when accessing things in the remote
profile, but should generally render the system much more usable.  You can
tweak what's redirected on a case-by-case basis (My Documents goes to
network, Downloads stays local, etc.) to optimize logon time vs process
load times.

I apologize if you've already gone down this road or this isn't a viable
solution to what you're describing, but it sounded like something you might
not have looked at just yet, in my head.

Justin

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Will Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Building profiles in a thawspace would be a partial solution; it'd allow
> for shorter login times if people go back to the same computer.
>
> It'd be nice if we could pre-generate profiles for everybody, but the
> numbers don't work.
>
> Each profile runs to to about 100 MB each;
> We have 208 GB free on each lab machine;
> and about 15,000 potential users.
>
> So generating profiles for all of them -- assuming five minutes per
> profile -- would take 52 days of computing time at the beginning of each
> term, and require about 1.5 TB of space on each computer.
>
> I'm hoping somebody will know a nifty trick for slimming down what needs
> to be created, or making PaperCut load faster, or something.
>
> Will
>



-- 
*Justin Rittenhouse*
*Sr. Application Development Technician, Web and Software Engineering*
*Hesburgh Libraries*

*University of Notre Dame*
208 Hesburgh Library
o: 574-631-3065
e: [log in to unmask]