Average boot times in a corporate LAN - any experience please? 1

[gbnut]

Hi all,

We are a corporate organisation which is part of a global AD forest, with our EMEA domain being one of 10 in the forest. The EMEA domain has approximately 8000 objects in it and 20 GPOs applying across various sites.

Some senior management people (non-IT) are complaining at a very high level that our boot times are unacceptable. After conducting tests at different sites (all machines are XP SP2 and hardware is less than 3yrs old), we've found that the average boot time at the complaining site is 2min 50sec. I have defined boot time as the point from which the power button is pressed until the desktop is usable, pausing the timing for entering login credentials. The complaining users reckon that any boot time over 1 minute is excessive and unacceptable.

I've been tasked with researching accepted average boot times in a corporate environment, but as you can imagine, there is absolutely no information on the net about this as it is so subjective and dependant on different environments. All the same, please could anyone with a setup similar in size to ours give me some approximate figures in terms of how long it takes a machine to boot...rounded-up, ballpark figures would be fine please. Essentially, is 2:50 too long?

Many thanks in advance,
Graeme

 

[Ploper001]

I haven't much experience with this, but I do know that any kind of network login does take a while...have you tried running BootVis on a few of the machines to see if there's a specific item that is taking ages at boot time? Like a specific driver or program? Or is the main culprit post-login?

 

[Grenage]

Oh dear, how demanding. Personally I would say that anything over a minute is unacceptable for a brand-new PC with nothing much on it. Three year-old machines though?

If they want instant access, they'd be better off not turning the machine off.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[gbnut]

Hi,

Well, we're pretty happy with 2min+ to be honest, but the problem lies with the Managing Directors who decide that any good network should be able to provide a login of 30-60 secs!

At bootup the longest time is taken at the "Preparing network connections" and "Applying security settings" stages, while at login we use Scriptlogic for various things which also takes up a chunk of time. But still, I've never worked in an environment where we've had a 1 minute boot time!

As for Bootvis, I only discovered it yesterday; it's installed, but I'm still getting to grips with how to use it and decipher the results.

 

[Ploper001]

BootVis cut the boottime of my old PC by about 5s, but for some reason when it runs a scanned boot on my current laptop, it just doesn't display anything in most sections - most importantly, the Drivers section, which is slightly beweildering and annoying...but it might work for you

Personally I would say that anything over a minute is unacceptable for a brand-new PC with nothing much on it. Three year-old machines though?

I have a PC that is just over 2 years old that I performed a clean installation on about 2 months ago. Getting to the usable desktop takes ~45s, and considering 20s of that is the BIOS time, that's pretty quick. Old machines can be good even with software on them I guess in a networked environment you're always gonna have relatively slow boot times though...

 

[gbnut]

Some interesting feedback here, thanks guys. It's interesting that you reckon brand new machines should be taking 45-60 secs; to start our testing I benchmarked our latest Dell D620 machine (2.16GHz dualcore processor, !Gb RAM). Over a number of runs the boot time without the network cable in was 1:08, and with the cable plugged in that time climbed to 1:59. This compares to the 2:50 on existing machines. Do you reckon then that 1:59 is excessive on the new machine? I thought that was normal when logging-in to an AD where GPOs and objects need to be enumerated and applied, Scriptlogic is mapping drives and printers etc.

As for bootvis, I'm experiencing the same thing as you Ploper001: most sections are empty. That's why I said I'm still trying to figure out it works; thought I was doing something wrong!

 

[Grenage]

I have a PC that is just over 2 years old that I performed a clean installation on about 2 months ago. Getting to the usable desktop takes ~45s,

True, but networked machines are always slower, and usually a considerably lower spec. My machine at home is on the desktop within 15 seconds of pressing the power button.

gbnute:

It's note really that excessive, but turning off features such as memory counting, IDE scans on boot will make things fater etc. I mean there isn't really that much you can do.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[Ploper001]

My machine at home is on the desktop within 15 seconds of pressing the power button.

I've always wanted to see how a fresh PC performs with a newer, super-quick BIOS. Because when I bought that PC in November 2004 (the newest PC I've built), the BIOSes were still really slow - 5s telling me the Video BIOS version, and then 15s just going through detecting the IDE drives, a list of IRQs etc...brilliant. Such a waste of time.

My laptop's boot is about 45s fresh also, but it's not that fast (1.67GHz Dual Core, so it doesn't perform much better than a single-core 1.67GHz CPU during boot time I'd imagine) - the reason is the BIOS section takes <5s from a cold boot, and <3s in a restart. What are your brief PC specs out of interest?

 

[Grenage]

Well it's using a RAID array for the drives, which is the reason windows itself loads quickly. As for the motherboard, I will have the check on the model for you, all I can remember is that it's an Asus board. I've a terrible memory. /smile


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[aich69]

Is it worth looking at the size of user profiles? A large profile is going to have quite an effect on network boot time.

 

[gbnut]

Good point aich69, worth looking into that. Thanks for everyone's responses so far...

 

[BadFrog]

If your in a corporate lan environment I'm going to assume that you use a tool such SMS to push out security patches, updates etc. That being said I have to ask how and when you do that. The reason I ask that is because you describe the boot time as being from pushing the power button to having a usable desktop. That implies that the PC's are being shut down. We continuosly preach to our users to RESTART their PC at the end of each workshift. The difference is the patches are installed during non business hours when the PC is idle versus installing them the next morning when the user powers up and logs in, thus drastically increasing the login time. Sorry for the lengthy response, I'm a bit wordy today. =P

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy"
Albert Einstein

 

[Rick998]

Some other things to consider:

1) Is the HD first in the boot order or is the BIOS set to look at other devices first, thus slowing the boot time.

2) DHCP is often significantly slower than using static IP addresses.

3) Too numerous entries in Windows' Prefetch folder will slow up getting to a stable desktop. Try clearing the Prefetch folder... it will be re-built over a couple of days.

4) If you increase the number of fonts then getting to a stable desktop will be slower. Conversely, reducing the number of fonts to just those required and no more will speed up performance.

5) Temporary files left hanging around increase the boot time as the system has to keep track of them. Clear Temporary Internet Files and reduce IE's cache from the default of 10% (8Gb or more on recent hard disks) to something like a more sensible 10Mb. Clear out wherever the system and user temp files are (by default the system temp files are in C:\Windows\Temp and user temp files are in C:\Documents and Settings\<account name>\Local Settings\Temp. Better still, create a folder called C:\Temp and re-direct both system and user temp files to it then use a shutdown or logoff script to clean the folder.

6) Reduce the size of the Recycle Bin from the default of 10% (8Gb or more on recent hard disks) to something like a more sensible 200Mb.

7) Clear the System Restore backup files (turn System Restore off, which deletes the files). If you have an adequate backup strategy (re-imaging?) then think carefully about whether you need System Restore turned back on again.

8) Defrag! Fragmented hard disks are slower to boot.

9) If the HD's have a second partition then move any swap file to the second partition to improve performance. If the PC has 1Gb or more RAM then consider turning the swap file off completely to improve performance.

Hope this helps...

 

[BadFrog]

Also for the record I think your boot times are acceptable. Your management needs their expectations adjusted.

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy"
Albert Einstein

 

[RNF0528]

I think there are alot of things to consider...

First, What is the location of your domain controllers in relation to your PC`s. If you do have GPO`s running and the DC`s are at a remote location (central office). This to could be an issue.

Second, If you have 20 GPO`s I would look into Exactly what all those GPO`s are doing. Find out if there are duplicated procceses in the GPO`s.

Third, Then i would look at the login scripts that are used in the GPO`s or are tied into the username.

Then, Try and figure out where the longest wait is becuase Policies are applied during startup and also during login. They are two seperate things. Knowing which one is takeing the longest will help you Narrow down the search.

I hope this helps...

 

[gbnut]

Hi again everyone,

Just wanted to say thanks for all your input; there are many things which you have suggested which I am going to investigate, and if we find the solution to our particular problem I will post it up here.

Cheers,
Graeme

 

[Frank4d]

Boot time (until the PC is usable) is about 3 minutes where I work. The problem seems to be with SAP, SMS, Altiris Agent, Carbon Copy, and to a lesser degree ActivCard running at startup. Most of the time the problem is not with SMS pushing updates; it is SAP and Altiris running their inventories.

 

[NortonES2]

I assume you have some AV software installed on these machines, it could be this running a startup scan which is slowing them down.

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If it doesn't leak oil it must be empty!!

 

[jwest1]

GBNut

Have done some research on our own network regarding this and would initially concentrate on your AD GPO's. Are they conflicting or do some of your PC's unnecessarily process some settings. The GPMC is a good tool to see what is going on.
Second thing to concentrate on is your AV software. We have shaved a lot off our login times by excluding certaiin profile related items during login.
Also we reduced the Recycle Bin & Temp Int Files size limits as suggested elswhere.