Login time for classrooms

[bhuntley]

Howdy all...

We've been battling (as many have) with long login times in our PC classrooms for years. We have finally managed to get things down to about 2-2.5 minutes, but have hit a roadblock trying to get things down any further.

Glorious stories abound about sub-20-second logins. Our faculty have apparently heard this as well and are insistent that we attain this holy grail. Would folks be willing to share their average login time for public labs and perhaps some high-level information as to what was done to attain it? I need to present some benchmarks to management on what other schools experience so we can establish what "normal" is.

We have a Win 2008/2003 R2 domain and Windows 7 clients. We map only a couple of DFS drives, have a total of three GPO's and map printers via a VB script in the startup folder. We establish the default profile pre-imaging the lab machines and ensure the user profile is wiped on logout. Only folder redirection is for mydocs.

tia.

-brian

[Brpilot99]

Hi Brian .... 2-2.5 minutes seems way to long .. Mine login in less than 20 secs ..

Just one thing that you could check .. is one of your servers setup as a DNS server? If not that would certainly add to the login times ... If you have one have you specified it in DHCP? I had login problems a while ago and to check if the DNS setting was working I specified the DNS server at a workstation and compared the logon times .. The workstation that had the DNS IP address input in the local network settings was noticably faster than one that picked up the setting from DHCP .. I re-installed DHCP specified the local DNS server and the problem went away ... ..

A pc that has DNS setup locally will always be faster than one that gets it from DHCP as there is no need to comunicate to the outside world and wait for a DNS server to answer ... How much quicker is a mute point and can only be determined by a test of 2 workstations side by side ...

Do you have roaming or mandatory profiles .. this can make a huge difference in login times ....

Just some ideas to chew over !!

Cheers
Brian

[ZeroHour]

We establish the default profile pre-imaging the lab machines and ensure the user profile is wiped on logout. Only folder redirection is for mydocs.

Tbh I think this could be where your problem is, we found creating a profile fresh as such (aka nothing saved, not mandatory) takes a bit of time with 2 minutes sounding close to what we had as windows has to set everything fresh each time regardless.
I would strongly look to go roaming profiles with redirected appdata/mydocs/etc or mandatory profiles with redirected mydocs. I think based on what you have said it fresh builds a profile which is wiped when you log off. If that is the case it will be slow.
I can say for sure we were 20-45 secs for logins after the initial profile was made for staff using roaming profiles.

[mavhc]

Turn on logging to find out which part is causing it to be slow

[Rozzer]

I found disabling stub paths and using a mandatory profile speeded this right up but printing can sometimes slow it down.

Ross

[pete]

Fully mandatory, stripped-down kids profile, with post stuff pre-filled? About 20-30 seconds, depending on where and what the machine is.
Roaming, on a machine they use as their main machine? Under 20 seconds - never bothered to time it.
Roaming, the first time they use a machine? Depends on the person but 40-60 seconds.

The Directory Services Team have a two-part blog post on diagnosing slow logins:

So you have a slow logon - Part 01
So you have a slow logon - Part 02

Then I'd start with a completely clean user GPO and add a few basic things (IE homepage, say) and time how long it takes to logon, wiping the cached profile every time.
Then add some more things, and time again.

And you'll begin to work out which GPO settings cause lag which you either hopefully fix or find another way of achieveing the same thing.

[FragglePete]

First time a user logons onto a machine, logon is around 50secs on average (always takes longer if you watch it! ) If they've been on a machine before, logon times are less than 20 secs, especially with some of our newer machines (i3 with 3Gb minimum).

Don't really do anything with profiles tbh, it's all redirected folders.

Pete

[bart21]

check in your gp for

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon\run logon scripts synchronously

disable it

worked for us, 2 mins down to 20 secas

nick

[morganw]

We have a Win 2008/2003 R2 domain and Windows 7 clients. We map only a couple of DFS drives, have a total of three GPO's and map printers via a VB script in the startup folder. We establish the default profile pre-imaging the lab machines and ensure the user profile is wiped on logout. Only folder redirection is for mydocs.

I've got a very similar setup and exactly the same speed issues. I think I'll try deleting the stubpath key from the mandatory profile at the weekend and see what happens. The only thing I know for sure is that trying to map printers with group policy preferences makes it worse (adds about 30 seconds), so I've had to go back to vbscript for printer mapping.