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Installation & update
About program installation and update, hardware, operating systems, setup, etc.
Our firm uses Macs almost exclusively and all our ArchiCad users are on Intel Macs. Users have network homes for all profiles. The server is running Mac OS X 10.5.6 with 10GB RAM (it also runs our mail server).
For several years our servers were linux based and were accessed with NFS. We frequently had "cannot save plan" messages and users had to save to other directories as the working directory appeared to have disappeared (until a restart). Two years ago we introduced an Xserve with RAID, running HFS+ filesystem, and transitioned from NFS to AFP for our Public file areas (home directories were still on NFS). All Project files were on AFP served shares (which were also served as SMB to virtual Windows machines and some lone workstations). we had no issues with Teamwork in this time.
In January we decided to complete the move to AFP for home directories in order to use some advanced Leopard functions, such as calendar sharing. Within a week we noticed CPU load spikes-- and the load would stair step, it would get higher, come down to a point higher than average, and keep inching up until we would kill the AFP server process. Around this time we noticed issues with people saving, and teamwork especially was unstable (send and receive would just hang).
Though moving only the home directories to AFP from NFS should have been negligible in terms of system load, it turned out many Apple users were having this issue I addressed this turning off Spotlight on the server and (more importantly) changing the WAN threshold and packet size on all the clients. In
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient, I changed to the following values:
afp_wan_quantum = 131072
afp_wan_threshold = 1000
(The original values were 0).
This helped a fair amount with the CPU issue, not nearly as many spikes (that didn't return to normal levels) and normal ArchiCAD users had much fewer problems. Teamwork issues remained however. It should be noted that when we switched to AFP home drives, ArchiCAD complained that caches couldn't be on a Network drive (basically ArchiCAD was oblivious to NFS). We changed the Cache directories on the clients to /Library/Caches, and further for the teamwork users, redirected all Caches to local machines through MCX.
Finally in mid February, Apple released a service pack that though not advertised, seemed to fix the Ever increasing CPU load problem. Our server load has stayed around .50 to .90, occasionally spiking over 1 (or 60% in Activity monitor) but always returning to normal levels. All is almost good, except--
Teamwork is still FUBAR. We have turned it off for the time being. In the mean time one of my CAD mgrs has relayed to me the following:
ArchiCAD has found no issues with our team work files (not sure if that entailed Mac testing or not).
It was suggested we turn off SMB oplocks on AFP shares. I did this, and maybe I should have known that already, but we were running for a year (on Leopard server) with it on before Teamwork started blowing up. Regardless, after disabling oplocks AND a server reboot, Teamwork was again FUBAR-- users only able to send and receive alternate times, sometimes everyone could work until one person sent and received, then it would hang for everyone. During this time most other archiCAD users had a minimum of issues.
It was also relayed to me that "Spotlight is bad news" for ArchiCAD-- which I find hard to believe since Graphisoft emphasized its interoperability with Spotlight on Tiger, AND to reiterate, we ran for almost a year with Spotlight on those public volumes with absolutely no issues.
Am I missing something with Regards to system setup and teamwork? Are there magic parameters I need to know about? Is Teamwork unable to handle AFP as a home directory? I eagerly await any response. It almost seems like we won't get any group productivity unless we regress to an inferior (as far as Mac utility) network architecture.
