Experiences with new AFS releases

I wanted to report on my experiences running the new OpenAFS releases.
I installed 1.5.10 a few days ago because it was the recommended release
for Windows users (I am running W2K+SP4).  While it seemed to work okay,
I noticed that it was very slow on some things.  Some causal
measurements suggested that stat'ing each file was taking about 1/3 of a
second.  So "ls -l" in a directory containing 200 files was taking about
a minute.  The previous version of AFS (1.4.1) was not nearly so slow.

I am running AFS on a T43 laptop from home, connected to the internet
via a medium speed wireless connection (about 256kbps) and to work over
a VPN.  The ping  times to the file servers in my home cell (behind the
VPN) are pretty large: about 150ms during the tests I conducted.

I ran some tests to confirm these performance numbers on v1.5.10.  The
command "ls -F | wc" took 76.1 seconds (user+sys = 0.37) to list 243
files: 0.31sec/file.

Then I reinstalled v1.4.1 (from Apr 2006) and ran the same tests.  The
same "ls -F | wc" command took 0.485s (user+sys = 0.29) to list the 243
files: 0.002 sec/file.

Next I figured I should try the latest stable release: 1.4.2a.  However,
I was not able to get it to work at all with my home cell.  I did have
some results with a different AFS cell on the same VPN and was also able
to access /afs/openafs.org.  I don't know what is different about my
home cell, but all attempts to access it lead to hangs and I could not
stop the OpenAFS Client Service.  It required an uninstall and an extra
reboot to clean it off my system.  The event log contained many AFS
messages during startup, several of which mentioned KfW.  I do not have
this package installed, so perhaps the logic to handle the case where it
is unavailable is not working.

After a few hours of rebooting, installing and uninstalling, I was able
to get the old AFS reinstalled and the performance is back to what I am
used to.

I can provide excerpts from EventLog, output from the tests I ran or
other details about my system or environment.  Let me know what would be
helpful.

Ted Anderson