Running Startup Scripts

Blog Administration

Trackbacks Currently Blocked

Sunday, April 24. 2005

Why does it take so long for an NMCI machine to boot up? Exactly what is the machine doing when it boots? Does anyone know?

We took a small sampling of boot up times for both laptop and desktop seats. Remember this is relatively current hardware running Windows 2000 -- not state of the art but certainly not something out of the 80s. These are average times.

Laptop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 37 Seconds
Laptop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 18 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes 55 Seconds

Desktop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 30 Seconds
Desktop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 12 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes, 42 Seconds

Of course NMCI attempts to mitigate these times by instructing users to not turn off their machines at night. Of course this flies in the face of the energy saving initiatives at many sites. More importantly, many laptop users have discovered -- the hard way -- that their laptop hard drives are not rated for continuous duty. Leaving these machines on 24 hours a day is the kiss of death for the older Dell hard drives.

It should be noted that some machines took significantly longer to boot, so much so that they were not even recorded in this sample and dismissed as aberrant. One desktop machine took over 10 minutes after log in to present a usable desktop. Several laptops on the same network at the same facility took an extra minute beyond the times shown here.

As a data point, the following times were taken from several legacy Windows XP machines running similar hardware.

From Boot to Login: 41 Seconds
From Login to Desktop: 17 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 58 Seconds

Certainly all of these times, NMCI and Legacy, are the result of dozens of variables. It appears that the NMCI machines are interacting heavily with Domain Controllers or something else on the network during boot.

Just as long as people are counting the extra five minutes of wasted employee time (several times a day for thousands of employees) when they tout the improved efficiency of NMCI.

in NMCI Follies at 09:03 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

One of the reasons the log on process takes forever is the actual startup script. I recently printed it out to see what was going (mainly out of curiosity) and to my surprise, it was over 70 pages long (single spaced).

Now, multiply it out by the thousands of machines that have to process it every single time they logon, on top of the extremely slow and poorly designed NMCI network.

#1 Subrun on 2005-06-20 13:30 (Reply)

They've moved to fix this. We just got notice that profiles will no longer be pulled to the remote desktop when you log on. I guess they were pulling all the IE favorites and all kinds of junk. We'll see how much this improves.

When we would go from the east coast to the west coast, it would take 10 minutes for us to log in. That's not an exageration. Hawaii was unbareable.

#2 Thomas on 2005-07-06 17:04 (Reply)

We still aren't seeing any improvements. We got that notice too but it still is taking for ever when we log in from remote. Waiting for the fix..........

#2.1 DroppedBall on 2005-07-08 08:32 (Reply)

The Windows XP comparison in your startup time measurings is innaccurate. Windows XP startup was heavily optimized.

Try comparing the two OS's on simliar hardware, in standalone mode. You'll find that the Win2k startup is still much longer than that of Windows XP.

The point is, if you're going to make the comparison, how about utilizing similiar hardware and OS's.

#3 Derek (Link) on 2005-11-01 16:02 (Reply)

I believe you missed the main focus of their original posting here, although you have a point. Let me see if I can break this down.

1. I don't know why you think the Windows XP boot up was "optimized" as my times are even better than that straight out of the box on comparable hardware.

2. I can't speak for the actual test machines here but I can tell you our NMCI machines boot only marginally faster even in stand-alone mode with no network connection at all. I believe you are trying to say that XP on a similarly bloated Windows network would boot slower. Certainly it would, but nowhere near as slow as the NMCI machine. There is more to this problem than just a network connection.

3. There is a huge variation in NMCI boot times. I've seen them blindingly fast and deadly slow. They both seem to perform fine once they are up and running. It is more than just a Windows 2000 problem.

4. I think all of us would love to compare a Windows XP NMCI machine to a Windows 2000 NMCI machine but since NMCI insists on using a 6-year old, deprecated operating system, that's not possible.

5. Your comment about Windows 2000 taking much longer to boot is spot on! That's the point. If they stepped into the 21st century with the rest of the planet we wouldn't be arguing about this.

6. I have never seen any other non-NMCI Windows 2000 machine (even on much older hardware) take so long to boot. There is much more going on here than simply OS and hardware issues. See Subrun's comments above.

So although I think the original posting made it sound like Windows 2000 is the only problem, I agree with you, there are other problems. But it looks like we both agree that getting rid of Windows 2000 is a good choice no matter how you cut it. Reducing their rententive start-up scripts and redesigning their networks would probably be an excellent place to start after that.

#3.1 Joshua on 2005-11-01 17:45 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?
Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.