Win10 (and 8.1) boot performance thesteriously sluggish

performancewindows 10

I upgraded to 10 from 8.1 recently (and 7 before that). On login, I let a bunch of programs I need autostart and go into the systray: procexp (for monitoring), chat clients, tools like super-f4 and flux, etc. This autostart situation has barely changed for years and shouldn't take long either because they're all fairly light programs.

On 7, things went quickly after login and my systray filled up with the necessary icons like they came from a machinegun. Ever since I got 8 and 10, that speed has decreased a lot, to the point where I'm waiting a long time for things to start but Windows barely seems to be doing anything at all. I've changed my antivirus and various other factors, and nothing helps. It seems to be Windows itself that's holding things down somehow.

I have a fast SSD, 8GB RAM, no particular problems of any kind, etc.

I did a check yesterday with windows performance recorder, and this is the graph overview:

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The CPU is idling half the time, my ssd isn't doing much, RAM is plenty.

Other people basically see their performance scale up until one resource is bottlenecked, which is how I want it. What could possibly be making my post-login startup take so long? I read vague hints here and there that newer Windows delays startup artifically for those people who don't want their PC to bottleneck a resource after login (which TBH is counterproductive), but can't find anything hard about this.

There is no recurring slew of errors in event viewer on login, so that's not it either.

What else could be slowing me down?

Best Answer

When you open the ETL in WPA, click on Profiles->Apply->Browse Catalog and select the file FullBoot.Boot.wpaprofile you see this overview:

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and see that the longest delay happens during the WinlogonInit phase (27 seconds).

The WinLogonInit subphase begins when SMSSInit completes and starts Winlogon.exe. During WinLogonInit, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and Group Policy scripts run. WinLogonInit ends when the Explorer process starts.

Visual Cues WinLogonInit begins shortly before the logon screen appears. It ends just before the desktop appears for the first time.

WinLogonInit Performance Vulnerabilities

Many operations occur in parallel during WinLogonInit. On many systems, this subphase is CPU bound and has large I/O demands. Good citizenship from the services that start in this phase is critical for optimized boot times. Services can declare dependencies or use load order groups to ensure that they start in a specific order. Windows processes load order groups in serial order. Service initialization delays in an early load order group block subsequent load order groups and can possibly block the boot process.

In your case it is not the CPU or disk. The Delay comes from typing in your password (RequestCredentials takes 16s).

Next the logon of the user itself also takes 4s:

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Do you now use a Microsoft account? Maybe the network is not stable enough and causes the delay.

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