Friday, September 9, 2011

TIPS AND TRICKS



Dipping My Toe Into the Xbootmgr Water
By Mark Morowczynski, Premier Field Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
I spent this past week in Windows Desktop Risk Assessment Program (WDRAP) training which was actually pretty fantastic. (If you are a Premier customer, talk to your technical account manager about getting one scheduled.) One of the areas I'm starting to pick up on is tools, specifically Xperf and Xbootmgr. Included in the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT), both are fantastic and I need to spend far greater time with them. One of the things we do in my organization is analyze a boot trace and look for improvements. I'm horrible at this today, but I'm getting better all the time. Smash cut to my own laptop that, at times, seems to be taking forever on boot up. Time to investigate.
First, I run xbootmgr -trace boot. Then I wait for my laptop to reboot and for the traces to merge so I can see what is going on. After looking to see what time services start up and how long they take to start up, something jumps out at me immediately.

That arrow pointing up is pointing to the service starting called sftlist.exe which is Microsoft App-V. The arrow pointing down is how long it's taking to start (that counter is in seconds). It's currently taking 195 seconds to start. While it's trying to start up, all the rest of the services to the right aren't able to start, which is part of the reason I'm having a long login delay. There must be some way to fix this. Perhaps this is a known issue?

Bam! This seems to be describing the behavior I'm having. Let me apply the update and try the xBootmgr again and see if it gets any better.

It is now taking 14 seconds and I just saved 181 seconds off my boot time with that one update. There is still plenty of work that I can do on my machine to speed it up and I'll continue to post more as I dive deep down into the world of Xperf and Xbootmgr.
Mark "it can't rain all the time" Morowczynski is a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft. He frequently blogs about the insights he gains helping Microsoft customers, and contributes to the TechNet forums.

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