Windows 7 Login times......

[ojhext]

Hi all,

 

This is not so much of a problem as such but a discussion on how best to speed up login times for users connected to windows 2003/2008 domains. I know if users have cached credentials login times are usually pretty good. But how do you fair when a 'virgin user' as to speak logs in. From login screen to usable desktop in around 45 seconds.

 

Any tips, housekeeping advice, PC spec, roaming profiles etc etc??

 

My stats:

 

From login screen

Non cached user

 

Over a wireless link 54MB

OS - Windows 7 32 bit

Dell Latitude E5510 - Celeron 1.87 Ghz, 2GB RAM

 

Time: 35 seconds (non cached user)

 

Time: 10ish seconds cached user

 

 

 

Regards

 

Oliver

[DrCheese]

Hiya,

I asked the same question a while ago here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/61188-windows-7-logon-speed.html

 

I spent a long time looking at this and in the end concluded that there wasn't much I could do with regards to initial logon speed. Even experimenting on my core i7 machine at home with a bunch of virtual machines I could never really get it down below 30/20 seconds.

 

The only thing I could say is that XP disguises the login time, i.e it will show the user the desktop but it actually won't be usable for another 5/10 seconds after that. If you take that into account initial windows 7 login isn't hugely different than XPs

[3s-gtech]

I addressed this here - Windows 7 login time with Local Profiles (due to working on roaming/mandatory) was around one minute.

 

I built a mandatory profile for 7, using the local profile from a test user (not the Default Profile and sysprep). I set up all necessary Windows settings, stripped out anything not needed, and set permissions for users on the hive. Login time on Windows 7 is now around 15 seconds for a new user, far faster than the XP mandatory profile user (set up in the same way).

[ojhext]

Cheers for the input guys. its good so see we at least get comparable results! 15 Seconds is very fast for non-cached user!

 

Regards

[DrCheese]

I was a bit wary of doing it the way 3s-gtech did it, as Microsoft says it breaks quite a bit here. It was the way you did things in Windows XP and below in the past.

Configuring Default User Settings

The manual profile copy process can cause issues such as:

 

• Their list of most frequently run programs is not cleared
  
• Whether the user has been introduced to the Start menu (will be set to TRUE for the source account, but should be FALSE for new users). Windows Explorer does some special things the first time you log on to introduce you to the Start menu and other new features.
  
• Whether the user is an administrator (and should therefore see the Administrative Tools, etc).
  
• The personalized name for “My Documents” will be incorrect. All users documents folders will be called “Administrator's Documents”. This is documented in the Knowledge Base article “The Desktop.ini File Does Not Work Correctly When You Create a Custom Default Profile” (The Desktop.ini file does not work correctly when you create a custom default profile).
  
• The default download directory for IE will be set to the Administrator's Desktop folder.
  
• The default Save and Open locations for some application with point to the Administrator's documents folder.
  
• Windows 7 Libraries are broken.
  

 

But the thing is, it logs on *so* much faster if I do copy over an existing profile that has already been loaded once. I'm struggling to see any of the issues that MS have warned about above, i.e the Windows 7 broken libraries.

 

Has anyone else done it this way and noticed any problems?

[jsnetman]

Deleting the stubpath registry entries speeded up mine (they are not really needed), if they exist you get the preparing your desktop applet in the top left corner when logging on, get rid of the stubpath entries and it does not happen and speeds things up considerably.

[3s-gtech]

Not noticed any broken libraries, the personalised name for my docs IS correct, the introductions to the Start Menu are incredibly annoying, default download directory works fine, and the Save and Open locations work. This may be because I did not use the Administrator profile to build the mandatory profile - I used a domain account in the Users OU, which I then moved into the Students OU to test.

[DrCheese]

Thanks.

I think I understand what they mean by broken libraries, when I use new profile clicking start > Documents can take anything from 5 to 15 seconds to show, whist if you make a profile the MS supported way it loads instantly. I'm going to have to decide if it's worthwhile trade off, or if I can work out how to resolve it.

Going into a library from word is instant tho

[DrCheese]

Deleting the stubpath registry entries speeded up mine

Tried that as well, that also breaks the libraries (Loading speed) using the premade profile or deleting the stubpath entries results in libraries taking 10/15 seconds to load every time you click on them.

Annoying... >.<

[mrbios]

On our slowest machines it's 30 seconds - mandatory profiles, the vast majority of that time appears to be group policies applying (mainly the printer policy strangely)

 

On faster machines it's generally about 20 seconds, overall not a worry at all, never seen any need to attempt to speed it up. The only problem users are the 25-30 roaming profile users we have but of those about 20 of them never change PC so it's not a problem

 

Libraries are completely disabled on our PCs, didn't seem worth the hassle they cause.

[apeo]

In an effort to speed up Mandatory profiles, is it a good idea to have folder redirections by editing the ntuser? i.e. editing Software\Microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.

 

What else could be done to the ntuser?

[mrbios]

In an effort to speed up Mandatory profiles, is it a good idea to have folder redirections by editing the ntuser? i.e. editing Software\Microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.

 

What else could be done to the ntuser?

 

Personally i did that so that if in the unlikely event group policy fails the redirects are still applied (never had that happen, but you never know ), apparently it's not best practice to do it but so long as you document it well so that anyone who comes along after your time there knows it should be ok.

[apeo]

Personally i did that so that if in the unlikely event group policy fails the redirects are still applied (never had that happen, but you never know ), apparently it's not best practice to do it but so long as you document it well so that anyone who comes along after your time there knows it should be ok.

 

Thanks for the advise, it does shave off 20 secs and as you say it will apply the redirects even if gpo fails, which i have found in testing wireless. That is I tested it with a laptop that has just had its wireless connected, logoff and logon with mandatory. All the redirects failed, very odd.

 

Is it worth redirecting appdata?

 

Do you mind me asking what other tweaks did you do to your ntuser?

[zag]

Mandatory profiles + SSD drives on the client machines make things crazy fast

[apeo]

Mandatory profiles + SSD drives on the client machines make things crazy fast

 

Bet it does, but SSD is still to expensive for us

[mrbios]

Bet it does, but SSD is still to expensive for us

 

£57 for a 40gb

 

We're getting 91 of them this summer, looking forward to it

 

Personally i don't do many tweaks to the ntuser file, it's left as small as possible, and the only files in my mandatory.v2 folder is the .man files and .log files that it makes itself, no other folders etc as everything else is redirected. I redirect appdata, never seen a problem with it myself, but some people do report problems.

[zag]

£57 for a 40gb

 

We're getting 91 of them this summer, looking forward to it

 

Personally i don't do many tweaks to the ntuser file, it's left as small as possible, and the only files in my mandatory.v2 folder is the .man files and .log files that it makes itself, no other folders etc as everything else is redirected. I redirect appdata, never seen a problem with it myself, but some people do report problems.

 

Yep we upgraded 120 client machines with SSD drives over the last few months. You can get the new Intel 40gb 320 SSDs for around 60 quid which is cheap for that amount of performance increase. You can upgrade an entire suite for 2k.

 

Student logons take about 10-12 seconds now. Its ridiculously fast.

 

I blogged about it here

 

The SSD experiment - Blogs - EduGeek.net

[mrbios]

Yep we upgraded 120 client machines with SSD drives over the last few months. You can get the new Intel 40gb 320 SSDs for around 60 quid which is cheap for that amount of performance increase. You can upgrade an entire suite for 2k.

 

Student logons take about 10-12 seconds now. Its ridiculously fast.

 

I blogged about it here

 

The SSD experiment - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

Yep the 320s is what we're going to be getting

 

Intels failure rates of SSDs is also about a 5th of that of any other SSD manufacturer.

[zag]

Yep the 320s is what we're going to be getting

 

Intels failure rates of SSDs is also about a 5th of that of any other SSD manufacturer.

 

Got about 135 in total in our school including web servers and hyper-v setups.

 

Not had a failure yet....

[apeo]

£57 for a 40gb

 

We're getting 91 of them this summer, looking forward to it

 

Personally i don't do many tweaks to the ntuser file, it's left as small as possible, and the only files in my mandatory.v2 folder is the .man files and .log files that it makes itself, no other folders etc as everything else is redirected. I redirect appdata, never seen a problem with it myself, but some people do report problems.

 

Nice.

 

Did you redirect AppData in ntuser or did you use gpo. Cant seem to get it to work using %USERNAME%, it just creates a folder called %USERNAME% LOL.

[pseu]

As mentioned with the SSD drives, it is likely the read/write speeds of the drives. This is especially the case for "virgin" users. You need to take into account that files are being written which takes longer than reading.

[pseu]

. . . .. . . no problem Ethan . . . . . . Lets keep kicking a dead camel on this . . . . . .

[mrbios]

. . . .. . . no problem Ethan . . . . . . Lets keep kicking a dead camel on this . . . . . .

 

?

[apeo]

Thought I would report back my findings, currently for quickest login time I've configured a mandatory profile with all the redirections, except appdata, in the ntuser.man and configured appdata redirection via gpo. Couple of thing to note however:

 

1. Redirected folders will not be created automatically so a policy is needed to create the folders for the users. I just used gpo prefs to create the folders, which seems to work as long as you tick "Run in user's login security context".

2. When redirecting appdata (probably other folders too), if you delete the folder that its redirecting to then you may get an error stating folder redirection fail and it doesnt recreate the folder. If this starts happening its like to be related to offline files cache and database so to fix reset it. Heres more on it: How to re-initialize the offline files cache and database and On a Windows Vista-based or Windows 7-based client computer, you can still access offline files even though the file server is removed from the network

 

The only reason I'm redirecting appdata is I'm not entirely sure how to redirect it in ntuser properly.

Edited June 13, 2011 by apeo

[RobBaxter]

I had this issue. Windows 7 has some pretty nasty (in our business) sync stuff by default. Trying to sync my teachers 2GB - 3GB profiles, can take a age, even with quite tip top internal transport infer-structure.

 

What I now do, is only sync the App Data and Desktops. The rest I use folder redirection to create direct mounts over to our file servers. This way, logon takes sub 20-30 seconds in all cases. I strongly suggest tho, NEVER adding folder redirection on the App Data. Simply because the real time interaction will either slow/lag out the client station OR worse, overload your servers HD R/W ability. If you use a NAS or other storage array, its not going to take to kindly to being hammered by your clients.

 

Also this cures a few wierd issues i get with profile / sync version issues. But thats a storey for another day!