Slow shutdown times "Saving Settings" forever

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Steel Chicken

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So all you Windows OS gurus, whats the most common cause of super long wait period while the computer is "Saving your settings" when you reboot or shutdown a windows box?

WIndows 2K, SP4, all the updates. Whats the most common thing that causes a long delay here? Otherwise the puter is running flawlessly. We are talking 2-3 minutes on a pretty fast box. No virus or adware crap I am aware of.
 
Commonly I see 3rd party program that will not terminate properly, forcing about a 2 minute waitbefore the OS will kill it. Try killing as many application/processes (from task manager) by hand, then performing a shutdown to see if the problem is still there.

Are there any messages in the event viewer on shutdown?
 
Phoenix86 said:
That setting is evil, pure evil, w/o a dedicated partition for the PF.
Click to expand...

Without starting a huge 10 page discussion, can you elaborate??

To OP: definitely take a look at what's running on shutdown. There are a few registry entries (waittokillprocess, etc) that you can change to speed that up some. Default is 20 seconds. Google around for them.

Cheers.
 
It's a destructive delete, which means it writes zeros over the old pagefile to make sure its deleted and it takes forever
 
arkamw said:
Without starting a huge 10 page discussion, can you elaborate??

Cheers.
Click to expand...
This shouldn't be a huge discussion. The main problem is page file fragmentation.

Lets use a single drive, single partition scenario to keep it simple.

When you write a file, it may or may not create a contigous file. This has to do with the file size and the contigous free space available. When you write a large file (as page files tend to be) it has a much larger chance of file fragmentation because there may not be 1GB of contigous free space. There will be 600MB here, 200MB there, 100MB over here, etc.

When you clear (delete) the PF on shutdown, the OS rebuilds it on bootup, every time. If you HDD is pristine, you may be able to create a contigous PF, but not likely. On a system that hasn't been defragmented in a while, this can cause a severly fragmented PF.

I have seen NT4 and W2K machines have LOTS of problems with a fragmented PF. Performance will suffer, esp if you use th PF a lot. But I have also seen BSODs, and boot errors because of severly fragmented PFs. I would assume XP suffers the same, but I haven't seen it (old job's OS setup caused this, and they weren't running XP at the time).

The setting to "let the OS manage PF" will also cause PF fragmentation when it grows the PF, if you exceed the current size. Unless there is space available on the HDD immediatly after the PF, when it increases the file's size it will fragment the PF.

A couple of file fragments in the PF isn't devestating, but it will affect performance. When I'm talking about errors caused by PF fragments, I'm talking a PF that's fragmented beyond what would normaly happen.
 
It should also (possibly) lead to high fragmentation as the dynamic size is changed again and again. Are there any more side-effects other than those?

edit: beat me to it.

Cheers.
 
Straight from MS

Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefileDescription
This security setting determines whether the virtual memory pagefile is cleared when the system is shut down.

Virtual memory support uses a system pagefile to swap pages of memory to disk when they are not used. On a running system, this pagefile is opened exclusively by the operating system, and it is well protected. However, systems that are configured to allow booting to other operating systems might have to make sure that the system pagefile is wiped clean when this system shuts down. This ensures that sensitive information from process memory that might go into the pagefile is not available to an unauthorized user who manages to directly access the pagefile.

When this policy is enabled, it causes the system pagefile to be cleared upon clean shutdown. If you enable this security option, the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) is also zeroed out when hibernation is disabled on a portable computer system.

Default: Disabled.

Configuring this security setting
You can configure this security setting by opening the appropriate policy and expanding the console tree as such: Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\
 
arkamw said:
Are there any more side-effects other than those?

Cheers.
Click to expand...
Not really. Some people think it's more secure because technically you can get data out of a PF, but you can also recover 0ed out files, so deleting it alone won't make it any more secure.

I think it's kinda pointless, I don't see a scenario where it would be usefull. That and it takes forever to delete and rebuild, causing slow startup/shutdown times.
 
interesting. I have not used those features, but ill check to see if manybe a security update turned them on. I also leave steam running all the time, maybe thats not shutting down correctly, good idea to check for non friendly programs.

I always set my pagefile to a set size and never let it change.
 
Common problem- not HD related. Open Group Policy editor (start>run>gpedit.msc) and expand local computer policy>administrative templates>system>logon. Configure Maximum retries to unload and update user profile. Set Max retries value to 1.

That'll take care of it.
 
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