Mac users experience chronic slowness

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

We have a large network of Macs (running El Capitan), talking to a Windows 2012 server with network home folders served over SMB and a normal AD domain. Since moving to the Windows server we have had an increasing number of issues for a lot of users, involving speed or lack of.

 

-We experienced a problem where users had "full control" of their home folder, which would lead the Mac to block permissions for the user, giving an entry for 'Everyone' to Deny access. We have since resolved this.

 

-The most recent issue is one where Safari and Chrome take an eternity to load. We are using a symlink to redirect the ~/Caches folder to the /tmp folder on the machine, which we have done for nearly a decade, but it seems that both browsers take ages to load.

 

-Sometimes Microsoft Office 2016 is glacially slow to open

 

We have been deleting the user's ~/Library folder in an attempt to blast any rogue settings, but this seems to not be a long term solution. We have also found that the ~/Library/Printers folder often has "everybody" deny permissions for some reason.

 

Is anyone else running OS X with a vanilla AD and Windows home folder environment? Do you have fully network home folders?

 

Client machines are 2.5GHz i5 machines with 8GB RAM and SSDs. Gigabit switched network.

 

Any help VERY welcome!

[FN-GM]

Have you checked that everything is ok with DNS?

[iSteve]

Reverse DNS was missing for our manged preference server - have added that in and will see how things go.

[FN-GM]

Good stuff. Hopefully it will get it sorted.