rhunt01
Well Known Member
Hello all,
I recently began researching the phenomenon of certain win2k FAT clients taking an extremely long time to perform installs due to an excessive amount of time “Searching for Previous Installation…” I found information in a couple of older threads that I have experimented with and wanted to follow up with some results.
First, any figures or conclusions are drawn from an average of a series of trials that were run on three different clients. These clients “Searched” for a period of time from 1 min and 30 seconds, to 15 minutes.
For my environment I found that:
-Tweaking NIC settings (10mb/100mb; auto detect, auto select, hardware default, half-duplex, full-duplex, etc.) did not effect search times. Optimizing these settings did allow for much quicker load times for the executable. Running \\deploymentserver\b7333\OneWorld Client Install\setup.exe yields a “starting setup…please wait” and a “Finding Installed Components”, before providing the installation welcome screen that allows you to click next and begin the “Searching for Previous Installation…”. When not optimized, this “loading” took as long as 90 seconds (not typical). After tweaking NIC settings, this occurs in as little as 5 seconds.
-Deleting old packages from the deployment server and removing entries from the Package_inf directory was not a factor for my test. I already had the packages and directory as lean as possible. This is not to say that this will not affect the process under a different situation.
-Defragmenting the hard drive also had little effect. This may have increased performance slightly, but not enough to offer a percentage increase.
-Disabling real-time virus protection had the greatest performance gain. This improved performance by about 34%. Unfortunately, real-time protection is set on the Norton Parent Server and it is not desirable to allow this to be changed at the workstation level. I therefore, changed the setting back to keep Win2k FAT clients with the same settings as all other user workstations. Changing virus settings to not scan the b7 directory may be an option here.
-I tried turning on the Indexing Service (C:\WINNT\System32\cisvc.exe), but this also has had no effect.
In a previous thread, Mike Trottier (mtrottier) stated, “I have found that the ‘Searching’ process can vary greatly from machine to machine even if the machines seem to be identical in configuration. (anti-virus on or off)”. I have found this to be exactly true! I have two identical workstations:
Dell Latitude C600, PIII 750MHZ, 256mb RAM, 4200RPM 30GB hard drives.
One completes the process in ~1min and 10 sec. The other takes in excess of 12 minutes.
The one conclusion I have come to is that the time it takes to complete the process is directly related to the amount of CPU time allotted to the setup process, ‘_Setup’ in task manager.
The fast workstation allots about 80% of its processor while the other allots about 6% and leaves the rest of the CPU time idle.
Anyone else have any final suggestions?
Thanks
Ryan Hunt
OneWorld XE; Update2; SP17.1_B1
AS400; V4R5
DS: Win2k SP2, SQL 7.0 SP3
TSE's: Win2k(SP2) & NT4.0(SP6a) with Metaframe 1.8
I recently began researching the phenomenon of certain win2k FAT clients taking an extremely long time to perform installs due to an excessive amount of time “Searching for Previous Installation…” I found information in a couple of older threads that I have experimented with and wanted to follow up with some results.
First, any figures or conclusions are drawn from an average of a series of trials that were run on three different clients. These clients “Searched” for a period of time from 1 min and 30 seconds, to 15 minutes.
For my environment I found that:
-Tweaking NIC settings (10mb/100mb; auto detect, auto select, hardware default, half-duplex, full-duplex, etc.) did not effect search times. Optimizing these settings did allow for much quicker load times for the executable. Running \\deploymentserver\b7333\OneWorld Client Install\setup.exe yields a “starting setup…please wait” and a “Finding Installed Components”, before providing the installation welcome screen that allows you to click next and begin the “Searching for Previous Installation…”. When not optimized, this “loading” took as long as 90 seconds (not typical). After tweaking NIC settings, this occurs in as little as 5 seconds.
-Deleting old packages from the deployment server and removing entries from the Package_inf directory was not a factor for my test. I already had the packages and directory as lean as possible. This is not to say that this will not affect the process under a different situation.
-Defragmenting the hard drive also had little effect. This may have increased performance slightly, but not enough to offer a percentage increase.
-Disabling real-time virus protection had the greatest performance gain. This improved performance by about 34%. Unfortunately, real-time protection is set on the Norton Parent Server and it is not desirable to allow this to be changed at the workstation level. I therefore, changed the setting back to keep Win2k FAT clients with the same settings as all other user workstations. Changing virus settings to not scan the b7 directory may be an option here.
-I tried turning on the Indexing Service (C:\WINNT\System32\cisvc.exe), but this also has had no effect.
In a previous thread, Mike Trottier (mtrottier) stated, “I have found that the ‘Searching’ process can vary greatly from machine to machine even if the machines seem to be identical in configuration. (anti-virus on or off)”. I have found this to be exactly true! I have two identical workstations:
Dell Latitude C600, PIII 750MHZ, 256mb RAM, 4200RPM 30GB hard drives.
One completes the process in ~1min and 10 sec. The other takes in excess of 12 minutes.
The one conclusion I have come to is that the time it takes to complete the process is directly related to the amount of CPU time allotted to the setup process, ‘_Setup’ in task manager.
The fast workstation allots about 80% of its processor while the other allots about 6% and leaves the rest of the CPU time idle.
Anyone else have any final suggestions?
Thanks
Ryan Hunt
OneWorld XE; Update2; SP17.1_B1
AS400; V4R5
DS: Win2k SP2, SQL 7.0 SP3
TSE's: Win2k(SP2) & NT4.0(SP6a) with Metaframe 1.8