Re: Tuning External GAL lookups

[Keith Fong <keith@sfu.ca>]

Hello Tim,

We also are using an external LDAP server for our Zimbra GAL, and are having similar issues in three features in the web interface:

- Hitting the To/Cc/Bcc button in a compose window
- Creating a new contact group
- Hitting "Find Attendees" in an appointment window

However, in our case, after the entire window freezes for about 30 seconds, we do not get any results at all.  We receive either no error message or a "No results found" message (depending on the tool used).

We have a very long standing support ticket open with Zimbra on this.  I'll let the list know if we get any resolution to this issue.


Keith



Keith Fong
Systems Consultant
Institutional, Collaborative, and Academic Technologies (ICAT)
IT Services
Simon Fraser University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Ross" <tross@calpoly.edu>
To: zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca
Sent: Thursday, August 7, 2008 10:40:50 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Tuning External GAL lookups



Hi- 

We are getting close to our go-live date with Zimbra at the end of this month.  I was wondering if anyone who is using their campus LDAP server for GAL lookups (Zimbra set to External Only lookup for GAL), has found a way to speed up the population of the initial GAL lookup.  For example, each time you click the "To" button in a new email message, the User Selection window opens and the GAL lookup will take between 5-25 seconds (may be dependent on speed of users computer and network setup).  This wouldn't be terrible if this only happened on the first lookup, but was then cached in memory for a certain period of time.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case.  Each time you close and reopen the User Selection window, it takes the same amount of time to load the initial GAL entries.  Are we missing a setting in Zimbra to cache entries?  Has anyone found a way to better tune the GAL performance? 

The other issue we are having with the GAL is that our campus LDAP server will only return 150 responses max for a single request.  This causes a problem with the Zimbra Connector for Outlook.  When we do a lookup there, it will pull the initial 150 responses, but if we try to search for an entry that is not within those 150, it does not find it.  Apparently, Outlook thinks it has downloaded the entire GAL into cache (which I believe is Outlook's general behavior).  This means that you can't look up a shared calendar (assuming you hadn't already added the calendar in through the web client) that does not fall within the first 150 responses.  We have a ticket open with Zimbra and we are waiting for the head of our Identity Management group to get back from vacation to see if there is anything we can do from our end.  Has anyone run into this behavior at their campus and found a workable solution? 

Just a note on why we chose External lookup only:  our campus LDAP server has the Ferpa protection for students built in, so it saves us from having to figure out how to modify Zimbra to hide Ferpa protected students in all areas of Zimbra. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. 

--- 
Tim Ross 
Application Administrator 
Collaboration Support 
Cal Poly State University 
756-6226