New Slow Logon, Slow Boot Troubleshooting Content

Hi all, Ned here again. We get emailed here all the time about issues involving delays in user logons. Often enough that, a few years back, Bob wrote a multi-part article on the subject.

Taking it to the next level, some of my esteemed colleagues have created a multi-part TechNet Wiki series on understanding, analyzing, and troubleshooting slow logons and slow boots. These include:

• Root causes for slow boots and logons (sbsl) - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10130.root-causes-for-slow-boots-and-logons-sbsl.aspx
• Tools for Troubleshooting slow boots and slow logons (sbsl) - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10128.tools-for-troubleshooting-slow-boots-and-slow-logons-sbsl.aspx
• Troubleshooting slow operating system boot times and slow user logons (sbsl) - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10123.troubleshooting-slow-operating-system-boot-times-and-slow-user-logons-sbsl.aspx

Before you shrug this off, consider the following example, where we assume for our hypothetical company:

• Employees work 250 days per year (50 weeks * 5 days per week)
• Employee labor costs $2 per minute
• Each employees boots and logs on to a single desktop computer only once per day
• There are 25 and 30 seconds of removable delay from the boot and logon operations

That means an annual cost of:

Benjamin Franklin would not be pleased

Even if you take just the understated US Bureau of Labor private sector compensation cost numbers (roughly $0.50 average employee total compensation cost per minute), you are still hemorrhaging cash. And those numbers just cover direct compensation and benefit costs, not all the other overhead  that goes into an employee, as well as the fact that they are not producing anything during that time - you are paying them to do nothing. Need I mention that the computer-using employees are probably costing you nearly twice that number?

Get to reading, people – this is a big deal.

- Ned “a penny saved is a penny earned” Pyle

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  This is really good, thanks to all that worked on it!   This will become one of my favorite bookmarks.  I also like that you all went with the wiki format so we can make changes and add content. Thanks Mike

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2012
  The 'twice that number' link is bad

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2012
  I blame others than myself!!! Fixed... >_<

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  So much for the "warning to others"  :D

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  Ah, the case for SSDs has made itself. ;)

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 ultrabook, which is my first real experience using SSDs. I thought they were an overpriced ubergeek affectation. I am now a believer though :-D. With Win8 beta installed on that thing, it goes from totally shutdown (s5) to the logon screen in around 6 seconds. I took it to a conference I was teaching at where someone had a brand new "professional" laptop with much better CPU and memory but a spindle drive, and I was mopping the floor with him running VMs.

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  Yeah - I mapped out my pay-per-second, then I did the math at how long it took me to reboot, multiplied by the number of reboots I have to do per year, plus general sluggishness when loading apps. Needless to say it only took a few months to get ROI just in idle time to pay for my SSD here.  I also did one at home and my boot time went from minutes-to-desktop to about 20 seconds (and that is only SATA2).  They're fantastic ;) Visual studio loads quick as a dream - no more hideous grinding!