Slow NIS performance with programs such as 'finger'

I'm not sure how much help you're going to get on this issue since only a small proportion of users use NIS.

Five seconds sounds like some kind of timeout to me. Can you use tcpdump to see if there's anything obvious that pops out?

Well, it is not like I use NIS at home all by myself :p if Ubuntu wont support it, just remove it from distribution then. So it would make the decision of which distro to use in large organisations easier.

I checked the packets using tcpdump limited to the NIS server.

Ubuntu had 24k lines in the output file
Fedora had 2.4k lines in the output file

Fedora was accessing port 767 and accessed an additional UDP port 770 and sometimes 938 on the server... while Ubuntu was just accessing 767 only so many more times...

I tried disabling iptables on ubuntu altogether and still the results are same. It is just that I am getting the correct info as well and finger seems to be working. I am not sure what might be timing out.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

hm, between 3-5 seconds here as well. on 12.04 as well as 13.04.

Are you using finger with the -m option and the username? That's way much faster since it doesn't strcmp all of the entries. Try ltrace finger -m userid compared to ltrace finger searchstring

Yes, -m seems to be working much faster...strange...

not really strange, from the manpage of finger:

     -m Prevent matching of user names. User is usually a login name; however, matching will also be done on the
           users' real names, unless the -m option is supplied. All name matching performed by finger is case in‐
           sensitive.