[bphlpt]

I'm not an expert in this area such as Andre is, but it might be along the lines of what you implied at the end of your post. MS changed some things around compared to earlier versions of Windows to improve the user's "experience". They made the desktop appear quicker, even though it was still busy starting services, background programs, etc. So maybe the counting doesn't end until the desktop is usable rather than just visible? That could explain why your stopwatch, based on what was visible, was off compared to what was reported. I would think that the optimization was meant to improve the measurement to usability, but with MS you never can be sure.

Cheers and Regards

[compsavvy]

@magicandre
Thanks. Will try and reply with results

[LemonJuice]

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

I'm not an expert in this area such as Andre is, but it might be along the lines of what you implied at the end of your post. MS changed some things around compared to earlier versions of Windows to improve the user's "experience".

I was implying something different at the end of my last post - I meant that sometimes windows takes longer to boot than usual because it has some extra tasks to perform like install an update or run some maintenance task. Maybe that first boot that was measured by xbootmgr was longer because of that, I didn't measure it with my stopwatch so I can't tell. But 55s was certainly not the usual boot time I experienced every day.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

They made the desktop appear quicker, even though it was still busy starting services, background programs, etc.

From my observation this was somewhat improved after win XP. I remember this was more of a problem in XP where I had to wait a minute or longer after seeing the desktop until it actually becomes responsive. In win 7 more services seem to start before the desktop appears so the waiting for responsiveness isn't that long - I'm not an expert on this but these are my observations.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

So maybe the counting doesn't end until the desktop is usable rather than just visible? That could explain why your stopwatch, based on what was visible, was off compared to what was reported.

I also thought it could be like this but my observations seem to suggest Andre was right that the measurement stops when the desktop appears - not when all services and startup programs are loaded. The final xbootmgr report of 20s matches my stopwatch when I stop measuring just when the desktop appears, and certainly it is before all startup programs are loaded.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

I would think that the optimization was meant to improve the measurement to usability, but with MS you never can be sure.

I don't think it would be easy to accurately measure when the moment of 'usability' happens since different services/programs start at different points in time (some are delayed, etc.), some are heavy on CPU usage while others have almost no impact running in the background so I guess it's much better to measure until desktop appearance since this is some definite point objectively.

But as I said earlier after the desktop appears it takes about 5s for my system to be responsive - I can't tell if it's 100% responsive but I can start Explorer and other programs right away without any delays and xbootmgr optimization didn't change that. I could believe if there was some 5-10s. improvement in starting up background services that don't affect performance much but the results suggest that the boot time went from 55 to 20s! This is a huge difference and I'm sure it wouldn't go unnoticed. Therefore I assume that either xbootmgr measured time incorrectly or that first boot took unusually long for whatever reasons. I believe xbootmgr might have optimized something but it hasn't affected my system much - certainly not more than 1 or 2s.

[terdiam]

Nice tutorial, this make 10ms my boot faster.

I added this tutorial to my blog

[MagicAndre1981]

terdiam, on 22 May 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

Nice tutorial, this make 10ms my boot faster.

10ms or 10s? 10ms would be a small improvement

[Daerdor]

Many thanks for this and your other tutorials. They are all very well written and contain a wealth of info!

My bootDoneViaPostBoot went from 144s to 66s

[MagicAndre1981]

great to hear that it improved your boot so much

[mvandoni]

I tried the process you suggest in this guide.
It took me more than an hour to complete and now my restart time is around 320 secs.
I really have no idea on what can affect so much my reboot time.
I just gave a look to the trace produced during the 6th reboot of the process and I see that most of the time my 2 cpu are idle (93% of the time) and most of this time (81%) I see in windows performance Analizer Summary Table is connected to Module=<Heuristic> Function=<Low Power State>.

Does this have a meanng for you?
Is there something I can show you to have some help?

Thanks
Michele

[MagicAndre1981]

make a full boot trace like shown here:

http://www.msfn.org/...yresume-issues/

compress the ETL as 7z or RAR and upload it to your SkyDrive orDropboxand send me a link or post the link here.

[mvandoni]

Hi Andre,
I PMed you the link to the file in my dropbox.
Thanks for helping.

Michele

[MagicAndre1981]

ok, you have 2 issues:

1st: running the group policies takes 65s
2nd: restoring the network connections takes 137s.

so fix both and your boot is fast again.

[mvandoni]

First of all thank you for looking into it.
I imagined it could be something of this kind but I couldn't find the proof.
The problem is that actually I'm home working and my pc need to have the vpn activated to connect to the domain, and I can start vpn only after boot.
Group policies and the restoring of network connections is forced by the company through batches which i cannot delete (if I do the system will reinstall them next time I connect to the domain).
So I think I cannot do anything to solve this situation.

Just for curiosity, where do you see in trace which are the problems?

Bye
Michele

[MagicAndre1981]

A workaround for the network would be to disable a GPO:

Computer/Administrative Templates/System/Logon/Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon

This can reduce the time when Windows tries to restore network drives when you are not connected to the network.


When you generate the XML you can see that WinLogonInit takes most time:

 Summary_XML.png (88.54K)
Number of downloads: 10

And the GPClient takes 65s.

Now open the ETL with the viewer, select the WinLogonInit phase, clone the section and go to generic events, make a rightclick an select "summary table". Now expand the Microsoft-Windows-Winlogon entry and you'll see this:

 xperfview_generic_events.png (48.3K)
Number of downloads: 6

This shows the other delay, here it is the Restoring of the network connections.

[mvandoni]

MagicAndre1981, on 07 July 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

A workaround for the network would be to disable a GPO:

Computer/Administrative Templates/System/Logon/Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon

This can reduce the time when Windows tries to restore network drives when you are not connected to the network.

I tried this but without great results.
Next machine I'll disable GPO before inserting the machine in company Domain :-)

Thanks for all.

Michele

[MagicAndre1981]

Also activate GPO logging and check the GP log and ask the admin to optimize them.

[mvandoni]

Hi Andre,
just to let you know that I solved part of my problems.
I looked for a solution to the mapped network reconnect on startup and I found the registry:
in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider I added a DWORD RestoreConnections set to 0.
This cut the login time from 320 to 170! It is still quite long but it is half the time then before!!

Now how can I activate GPO loggin? And where do I find the logfile produced? If I could solve also the second problem with GPO my reboot should have another boost!

Thanks
Michele

[MagicAndre1981]

this is a huge improvment

To activate GPO logging do this:

1.) create the folder C:\Windows\Debug\UserMode

2.) add this to a new .reg file and import it to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics]
"GPsvcDebugLevel"=dword:00030002

now reboot t capture the GPO run and analyze the file:

http://www.sysprosof...yreporter.shtml

This post has been edited by MagicAndre1981: 12 July 2012 - 02:53 PM

[clanderson]

Alright - I'd love to go through this tutorial and check out my results, but when it boots back up after the first reboot (processing the 2nd), it gets stuck at "Preparing System" and stays there for quite a long time. I got fed up with it and rebooted the computer manually, expecting the process to have stopped, but instead, it resumes logging and tries to go through the 2nd reboot process again. Still getting stuck at "Preparing System".

What can I do to solve this?








Windows 7 x64
8GB DDR3 RAM
2nd Gen Core i5 2450m
Intel HD-3000 Graphics

[MagicAndre1981]

During the preparation time Windows defrags the HDD. Open ProcessExplorer and look if the defrag service (defragsvc) still runs.

You can also always stop it and run

xbootmgr -remove

to stop the run.

[f1charlie]

It seems to be a bit quiet in here - perhaps Andre has fixed everyone's problems

Perhaps Andre or another magician could help me out. I have run the Readyboot training which did speed up my boot to the Windows login page (although it still takes about 90 seconds), but I still have a delay after that during which the disk is constantly accessed for several minutes. This means I have to wait until this phase is over before logging in, or if I do log in, the desktop is pretty much unusable until the disc accessing has finished. I have run a boot trace which I have uploaded here (hope it works as I've never used this before):

https://skydrive.liv...2B8036206DE!112