NT shuts down slooooowwwwllllyyyy....

[jaeddy]

I have an HP LPr, 1GB RAM, dual 800 P-III. We did a clean installation of NT server SP 6a, along with IIS 4.0, Segate Info and some home-grown apps. The machine runs beautifully, but any time we have to restart it it takes nearly 10 minutes for the shut-down to complete. It reboots very quickly once it finishes shutting down and there is nothing in the event logs to indicate a problem.

Any ideas out there?

 

[kjonnnnn]

Ten minutes isnt that bad. Try shuting down my server. It depends on how many services and apps that must be closed.

 

[jaeddy]

Normally, I would agree, but we have LPr's here with higher loads that cycle from Restart to Ready in 5 minutes.

 

[ccaathl]

try writing a few batch files that shut down the services first.
especially the spooler if that is open

 

[jaeddy]

I'm on it. At the moment I am running tests with detail logging enabled to see if I can id what is taking so long to exit.

 

[jaeddy]

No dice- seems all processes that can be tracked exit within 20 seconds, then it just twiddles it's thumbs for 9 minutes before finaly cycling over. Spooler service is disabled since there is no printing going on.

 

[jaeddy]

Been playing that old game of "One of these things is not like the other." I have 3 machines, all recently rebuilt, which exhibit this behavior. Older builds have an older raid driver so that's where I'm concentrating now.

 

[Zelandakh]

Slow shut downs where nothing untoward is happening (it just twiddles its thumbs) are often down to your disk config.

Check that you are using the latest drivers for your disks, RAID, backup units and anything else accessed like a drive. If you insist on using NTs disk tools then expect things to go slowly.

If you want speed use hardware RAID units only...

 

[jaeddy]

The LPr comes with a very nice hardware raid 1 setup. All the BIOS levels for the controllers are up to date. There is a new raid driver available, but so far all the machines are using the same version driver and only these three have a problem. When I eye-ball the shutdown I notice that the raid array is thrashing away as if there is a huge sync going on. This lasts for 7 to 8 minutes, then the system restarts normally. Furthermore, as noted previously, in all other respects the machines perform flawlessly. They just take a long time to shut down as compared to other identical machines. I am gearing up to just tell my boss to live with it

 

[clocke2000]

Is it report any thing when shutting like does it hang a little longer on writing memory to disk?

 

[jaeddy]

No, it reports nothing. Detailed tracking shows all processes exiting in good order within 20 seconds of the shutdown command, but the raid 1 array thrashes away for a good eight minutes oafter that. I've contacted HP and they suggested updating the raid adapter drivers, but since I am running the same version of the drivers on all my LPr's I have to take a skeptical view of that. Still plugging away.

 

[mikes999]

I am sorry for a stupid suggestion, but have you tryed to look at the services running during the shutdown, and to kill them, one at a time?

It worked for me a couple of times...

 

[SteelDragon]

one other suggestion.... look at your TOTAL ram usage and swap file usage before you shut down. It may be that something has an enormous amount of data in ram, or swap file and it is storing that data during the shutdown operation. To monitor this you can watch task manager, performance tab, OR performance monitor, set it for monitoring RAM usage, and Hard disk access. The only issue with performance monitor is that when you click shutdown, it will be one of the first things killed. Task Manager does not usually suffer this fate, it is usually the last thing killed before reboot.

Good Luck,
SteelDragon

 

[jaeddy]

After a long time I finally locked this down- there is a registry key set to clear the page file at shutdown. This makes NT do e secure purge of the file so that it cannot be parsed by Evil Hackers (tm). Anyhow, on these particular machines the page file is statically set at 1.5GB and it was taking a few minutes to complete the job.