[ipxe-devel] Win7 x64 iSCSI install - insanely slow shutdown time

[Steve Cross]

Thanks for the good suggestions, definitely some good ideas. I did try
increasing the write back cache from 128 to 512 (I can't spare any
more than that on this server), but it did not help any. I disabled
windows search service to see if it was trying to index and there was
no change. I also disabled the pagefile and it didn't seem to make a
difference. I am still seeing 5-8 minute shut down time vs. 60 second
startup time.

I have also been doing some performance monitoring and there is
basically 0 device activity after the first minute or so of shutdown,
so it leads me to believe that something on the system itself is
causing the shutdown process to hang.

Since this is the kid's HTPC, I don't get too much time to play around
with it but I have a second NUC (identical model) that'll be here
today and it's going to have the iSCSI setup. I am going to see if
there are any bios settings that might make a difference, and try to
do some more debugging.

Steve Cross
hairlesshobo at stevecross.org


On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Andrew Bobulsky <rulerof at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Steve Cross <hairlesshobo at stevecross.org> wrote:
>> Hey everybody,
>>
>> Been a little while since I posted on here. I finally got my Intel
>> NUCs that I wanted to get and they run great. Got them up and running
>> with iSCSI and everything is great - except shutdown time. The system
>> will go from power off to running windows in 60 seconds, but it takes
>> 6-8 minutes to shut down and I have NO clue why. This is quite
>> annoying because whenever I do have to shutdown my iSCSI server, I
>> want to make sure that all clients are cleanly shutdown first and this
>> is quite an insane length of time for a very clean install of Windows
>> 7 to shut down. I was wondering if it could have anything to do with
>> iSCSI, or if perhaps there may be some suggestions (not directly
>> related to iPXE) that you might could offer.
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>>
>> Steve Cross
>> hairlesshobo at stevecross.org
>
>
> Hello Steve,
>
> During Windows shutdown, aside from general write cache buffer
> flushing, sometimes the process of reconciling the pagefile can slow
> things down, too.
>
> I can suggest that, if you really want to debug this issue from the
> Windows side, you could run Sysinternals' Process Monitor... though it
> occurs to me that while the tool supports boot-time monitoring in
> addition to running on a live system, I have no idea how it would play
> out for shutdown.
>
> As a general rule, I like to disable the swap file on iSCSI-booted
> systems, or at least move the page file and hibernation files to a
> local disk.
>
> You can disable the swap file from the GUI as normal, and the
> hibernation file can be shut off by running
>
> C:\> powercfg /h off
>
> from an elevated command prompt.
>
> This may not fix your problem at all, but I thought I'd throw in my
> two cents as to where I would start, at least on the Windows side.
>
> Additionally, on the iSCSI target, make sure it's configured with at
> least a reasonable amount of write-back cache; say a gig or so.  That
> really speeds up buffer flushing on the initiator side (or I'm
> suffering from the placebo effect, but I swear it works :P).
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew Bobulsky