If you are using Active Directory for authentication for your OBIEE system, and are experiencing situations where some users are taking a long time to authenticate/login, then this post might be helpful. This could also be useful for configuring LDAP systems other than Active Directory, but I cannot say for sure.
What could potentially be happening to users experiencing the problem is … they belong to Active Directory groups (or LDAP groups) with deep hierarchies, and the system has to traverse all those hierarchies to retrieve all their LDAP information which ends up taking quite a bit of time. A possible solution is to limit the number of LDAP levels that will be searched/traversed to get the users Groups information.
Login to WebLogic Administration Console (aka WLS or Admin Console), then click on “Security Realms” on the left, and then click the name of the realm that you use for security (for example, “myrealm”).
Click the Providers tab. And then click the name of your Active Directory provider.
Then select the Provider Specific tab.
Scroll down to the section titled “Groups”.
Change the Group Membership Searching setting from unlimited to limited.
And then set Max Group Membership Search Level – change it from 0 (no limit) to 1 (or to the smallest number necessary for your environment).
This will prevent long searches for those users that are in many groups with deep hierarchies (such as groups within groups within groups and so on). This could cut the search time tremendously, thereby reducing the authentication time and preventing login timeouts.
Good luck!
The Data Community 