Initial SFTP login times out

Greetings,

I administer a server of all of our client web sites. Starting a few months ago we began experiencing problems with logging into new accounts via SFTP. The first login attempt would time out a couple of times before logging in successfully. From then on, all subsequent logins go through fine. My presumption is that it is timing out because virtfs is taking too long to set up. Rebooting the server generally fixes this issue temporarily, but the longer we go without rebooting the longer it takes to log in successfully (1-2 minutes).

Question, is there anything we can do to speed up virtfs set up when it slows that doesn't require rebooting the entire server. Am I even looking in the right place? Could this be something else that causes initial login to time out?

 

Problem solved. Or, at least identified.

It appears that the server has not been cleaning up after a jailshell sessions. There were 20,000+ mount points in virtfs still lingering from old jailshell sessions. After running a script to unmount them all the server is running fine again.