Disabling sections within a single GPO for testing

[CyberDrac]

We have a single, quite complex, GPO which contains all the settings required for a student restricted account, however it has never been as fast as we feel that it should have been. For example the computer GPOs and a couple of user GPOs result in a login of a maximum of 33 seconds, the moment the other GPO is introduced we hit 2 minutes and 45 seconds. My first though is to disable sections of the GPO and narrow down the offending part, but I cannot see a way of doing that. Am I overlooking something?

[Geoff]

No you should have two sets of GPOs. Your big monolithic 'production' GPO(s). Then smaller 'testing' GPO(s) that only apply to your testing suite(or PC) / OU / etc. That way you can tinker in a fine grain way and narrow down your problems without breaking everything. You can be lazy and just have lots of small GPOs, however this has a negative performance impact on your Login times due to the extra processing required.

[CyberDrac]

I was testing with a copy of the monolithic GPO in a testing OU structure with a test user and a test machine ... but I ended up pruning one item at a time until I found the offending entry, at which point I re-copied the original, adjusted the single faulty entry and re-tested. It would have been nice to simply disable branches of the OU structure and test at each stage, re-enabling afterwards. It is effectively what I did manually, but it made it, in my opinion, unnecessarily arduous.

 

The entry at fault on this occasion was the folder redirection. The setting was set correctly, at least to the visible eye, but removing the 'Documents' folder redirection removed the delay. Surprisingly, reinstating the folder redirection allowed it to stay fixed. I suspect that the entry was corrupted and un-setting and re-setting the value re-wrote it to a valid value.