Want to highlight a helpful answer? Upvote!

Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

tekwerx IT Author

Level 1

0 points

Mavericks Server Not Disconnecting Users

I'm looking to brainstorm with others out there who have deployed Mavericks servers who are experienceing issues with file sharing services. I have about 7-8 servers that I have done recently with Mavericks Server that all experince varying levels of issues with users connecting to AFP not disconnecting properly.

One extreme case, is where a server has about 25 users, and at the end of the day, Server shows upwards of 40 connections. Many of the users will have two and three connections even though they are on one machine with one IP.

Eventually what happens is that users begin to have permissions issues, read-only notifications when trying to open a file, and the beachball when trying to save a file they were editing off the server. I have minimized the problem by having all the suers shut down their machines at night, and for some, set thier machines to never sleep during the day. I also have the server restarting every night to break the connections.

I have also gone in and turned on the disconnect idle users, changed the disconnect idle users time, and changed the sleep and idle times with no success in fixing the problem. If I don't restart the server at night, users will show connected for as long as it has been since thier initial connection. I also went into sharing in the system prefs and checked the connected users there. It is the same that shows in the server.

There are some other similar discussions out there, but I need to focus this bug on AFP.

OS X Server

Posted on Mar 20, 2014 7:19 PM

28 replies

DasRed

Level 1

0 points

Dec 4, 2014 7:42 AM in response to Richard Cartledge

Experiencing the same issues now, company of 25 users, seeing connected users upwards of 100, many repeats with same IPs.

One in particular about once a week, finder and any open documents crash and she cannot access again until all connections are terminated from the server and then everything is back to normal for a while.

Richard - You stated it's a client problem, care to elaborate?

chrisblt

Level 1

12 points

Dec 4, 2014 9:38 AM in response to DasRed

My company is also unfortunately experiencing this problem, but on two Mountain Lion servers. Seemingly every day we have to stop/start AFP completely on both of those servers and it's getting pretty aggravating. Any help or acknowledgement from Apple on this would be greatly appreciated!

Dec 4, 2014 9:42 AM in response to chrisblt

This is fixed in Yosemite, I upgraded clients to Yosemite and fixes this issue, my server still running Mavericks.

Dec 4, 2014 5:13 PM in response to Hector Castillo

I would like to see a few more examples of this being "fixed" in Yosemite before I start mass-upgrading all of my various client sites.

🙂

Dec 6, 2014 10:37 AM in response to tekwerx IT

I am experiencing this issue as well. My difference is that the server is 10.7.5 (Lion). The multiple entries started when I upgraded the client machines to Yosemite. I suspect it is something in the clients and not the server but I have no specific data to support it other than that it happened once I updated the clients to Yosemite.

Nemesis

Level 1

35 points

Mar 20, 2015 9:57 AM in response to tekwerx IT

The AFP process on the files servers we have started to crash multiple times a day after we upgraded our client machines to Yosemite. Before that the AFP process would run uninterrupted for more than year with hundreds of connections (no exaggeration there). The AFP process now crashes on server running 10.6.8 and 10.9.5, multiple times a day. We have not yet tried upgrading a server to 10.10.2 as Yosemite defaults to SMB, which is quite a bit slower than AFP. Besides ending up with 'in use' MS Office files, InDesign will crash when the AFP process restarts, causing the operator to loose work.

Nov 17, 2015 3:44 AM in response to tekwerx IT

Same here.

Brand new install of 10.10.5 server with 10.10.5 clients. Only the laptops in the building seem to have this issue (many connected over 20 times with the same idle-time and IP). All connected through AFP, this also happened with SMB and then dragged the datatransfer rate of the server to a halt.

I will try to turn off WiFi on the laptops, maybe that helps.

Nov 17, 2015 4:49 AM in response to TheDesmodus

I still occasionally see the concurrent connections even with Yosemite clients. I have started upgrading some of my servers to Yosemite and Server.app v4/5 so we will see if the behavior changes.

In almost all cases where there are many concurrent connections from the same user its a laptop that is connecting over WiFi. Even if they are plugged into Ethernet I think there is still trouble happening when that connection is unplugged and the connection to the server rolls over to WiFi. Turning WiFi OFF seems like a good idea. 🙂

TheDesmodus, what kind of WiFi infrastructure do you have at your site? Pretty much all consumer WiFi hardware is pretty terrible. Even the Apple stuff.

Nov 17, 2015 5:04 AM in response to Eric Bullock

Eric, I think indeed that that is what is happening.

We have multiple Airport Extreme's linked through a Radius server. Coming week I am phasing out the current WiFi (that is on the same subnet) and switching to WiFi on a separate subnet and have clients connect to the servers through OpenVPN.

Fingers crossed that this will also stop the problems above.

marisa44

Level 1

4 points

Nov 18, 2015 8:10 AM in response to TheDesmodus

Guys, I have the exact same problem and all my Macs are connected through Ethernet cables.

I started with smb privileges issues (the macs which connected through smb had no read and write privileges in the documents kept in the Server). I forced these macs to connect through afp and the privilege part worked excellent, but now the afp (from these macs) disconnects several times a day. I suspect that all the events I've described are related.

Regards,

Nov 18, 2015 8:14 AM in response to marisa44

But are these machines laptops or "desktop" systems like an iMac or Mac Pro?

Also, what version of the OS are the clients running, and what version of the OS is the server running? And what version of Server.app?

I've had nothing but problems with SMB so I typically do not enable this on any of the sharepoints I create.

Nov 25, 2015 9:54 AM in response to tekwerx IT

I am seeing this issue on a 10.10.3 server with clients ranging from 10.8.5 to 10.10.5. I see it on a 10.8 machine and on a 10.10.4 machine currently.

I am working on a nightly relaunch of AFP however SMB doesn't solve this issue.

i will work to file a bug report also

Jan 17, 2016 8:13 AM in response to tekwerx IT

Dear Telwerx,

I had the same problems, also involving errors -13 (resource temporarily unavailable) etc. I tweaked the afp:replyCacheQuantum, which is originally at 32 and set it to 256:

$ sudo serveradmin set afp:replyCacheQuantum=256

This improved the stability of the AFP connections considerably while eating into physical memory (I have 8GB) and CPU resources (the AFPFileServer process now has about 203 threads and consumes up to 40 % CPU).

Mavericks Server Not Disconnecting Users