Trace Windows 7 boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues

[doveman]

On one boot today I got this

Background optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process:
Name : BackgroundPrefetchTime
Total Time : 39702ms
Degradation Time : 36964ms
Incident Time (UTC) : ‎2013‎-‎07‎-‎31T10:16:45.765200400Z

but the boot time was not unusual (sometime it takes 49s, other times around 69s), which doesn't seem to make much sense if this task took 39s, which was an degradation of 36s. Should I just ignore this task in future?

Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 59575ms
IsDegradation : false
Incident Time (UTC) : ‎2013‎-‎07‎-‎31T10:16:45.765200400Z

Both these events were logged at 11:19:03, so I'm not sure what the Incident Time is referring to.

[doveman]

the Resource Monitor shows the disk queue:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/use-resource-monitor-to-monitor-storage-performance/

For me it just seems stuck on 0.01 or 1 whatever the graph is doing and even if it showed something useful, there's no logging or way to correleate the disk queue with what is happening at that moment on the system.

[MagicAndre1981]

because there is no proper documentation about the Eventlog entries, I can't comment the data. I only trust the ETL files.

[doveman]

Hmm, it's crept up from 41s to 122s, (next boot 98s) now! I disabled most startup apps and now it's 81s but I still think that's too high. Obviously having apps loading is going to increase it from 41s without any loading but I shouldn't think it should triple!

I installed Comodo Firewall again yesterday so did the "xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot" after that but the 122s was immediately following that.

If you could check the boot trace for me I'd be grateful.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESTVU3YzZQWTNrRXc/edit?usp=sharing

[MagicAndre1981]

again the disk is busy and TVservice is slow to start. And you still haven't installed the performance updates.

[doveman]

again the disk is busy and TVservice is slow to start. And you still haven't installed the performance updates.

Sure but it's the same disk that booted in 43s before and people have been booting from HDD for ages before SSD became popular and we were able to minimise boot times still, so I don't think the fact I'm using a HDD is the problem.

I'll check it with the TVservice disabled though to see how much that's adding and try the performance updates (after making a backup) although they're quite old aren't they, from 2011, so you'd think if they were that important they'd have been included in Windows Update by now.

[doveman]

I moved my HDD to a SATAIII port to see if that would help.

I also disabled the TVService to test but strangely, I had a boot of 67s before doing this, then the next boot it was 84s and then 72s.

I've uploaded the traces for both (with TVService is _1.zip, without is _2.zip) along with the extracted summaries, if you take a look and see how they compare to previously please.

boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER_1.zip https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESOC1hVklTRVg1bFk/edit?usp=sharing

summary_boot (TVService).xml https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESNmc1QzVQN0daVGM/edit?usp=sharing

boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER_2.zip https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESRU91RHhWZE5IWGs/edit?usp=sharing

summary_boot2 (No TVService).xml https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESNmJsR1FaeldKY0E/edit?usp=sharing

[MagicAndre1981]

your post boot (running all tools at startup) is the issue because the HDD is again busy. I don't know how often I should repeat this again.

[doveman]

As I've said before, I have barely anything running at startup, so that can't be the issue.

[MagicAndre1981]

you run a lot tools like NFS server, TeamViewer, RAMDisk, COMODO, MySQL Server at boot

[doveman]

you run a lot tools like NFS server, TeamViewer, RAMDisk, COMODO, MySQL Server at boot

Ah, well they're running as services, hence my confusion

Anyway, I looked at the xml and as far as I can tell, none of those are taking a long time to load but I don't pretend to understand how to interpret the summary properly so maybe I've misunderstood something. Does it show that any of those are causing delays?

[doveman]

Well I did some more tests.

Starting with a boot time of 72s

0. Disabled Services: dnscrypt-proxy, MCEBuddy, NFS Server, No-IP DUC, SunRPC Portmap Daemon, TV Service - 67s

1. Disabled Classic Shell, LP Installer: 50s

2. Re-enabled Classic Shell - 56s

3. Re-enabled LP Installer: 52s

4. Re-enabled Services: dnscrypt-proxy, NFS Server, No-IP DUC, SunRPC Portmap Daemon - 52s

5. Re-enabled MCEBuddy - 62s

6. Disabled MCE Buddy, enabled DVDFab Passkey, Jitsi, Peerblock - 74s

7. Installed Avira Antivir - 140s

8. Ran verboseReadyBoot again - 130s

The numbers correspond to the summaries and zipped ETLs I've uploaded here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1fDI89phEESMGdyUTl3a2pIaEU&usp=sharing

Clearly Avira Antivir is a big problem, so I might try uninstalling that and installing Avast again, as I did record a boot with that installed of only 53s.

EDIT: Yep, with Avast instead, after doing verboseReadyBoot again it's back down to 90s, which is reasonable. It's going to go up when I re-enable TVService and MPExtended but they just take a long while to start and it can't be helped, so I think this is about as good as I can expect.

Edited August 7, 2013 by doveman

[tony10987]

Hi!

Can you please have a look at this ETL I don't know how to read through it

I think I did every thing correctly (had to remove DRIVERS as it gave me a blue screen)

Edited August 21, 2013 by tony10987

[MagicAndre1981]

your Windows boots in 26s to the desktop and is fully booted in 50s:

- <timing bootDoneViaExplorer="26505" bootDoneViaPostBoot="59905" 

check if you need all those Lenovo tools at startup. Also try if disabling Kasperslky makes Windows faster (Kaspersky cause a lot of disk IO).

[tony10987]

your Windows boots in 26s to the desktop and is fully booted in 50s:

- <timing bootDoneViaExplorer="26505" bootDoneViaPostBoot="59905" 

check if you need all those Lenovo tools at startup. Also try if disabling Kasperslky makes Windows faster (Kaspersky cause a lot of disk IO).

Thanks!

Indeed, Kaspersky slows windows a LOT, but I can't find any better anti virus. However, it has a "postponed start up" option which helps gain a few seconds.

How do you create the XML from the etl? and where is the files saved? I've tried running the command but couldn't see any xml file.

Edited August 21, 2013 by tony10987