Windows 8.1 Boot Hangs – Fixing Session Init Delay

bootperformancewindowswindows 8

As the title already says, my Windows 8.1 installation take quite some time to boot (without FastBoot).

I managed to record an etl file of the boot process. The result is a very large file: 4.5GB, compressed: 250MB

When viewing this file in the Windows Performance Analyzer, I see that of the 144s boot time, about 120s are spent in "Session Init" phase and for about 90s of that time it is basically doing nothing, with smss.exe using full cpu on one core, and nearly no I/O happening.

Can you recommend a way to analyze the situation?

Best Answer

Initializing the Registry (ntdll.dll!ZwInitializeRegistry) takes a loot of time and causes the CPU usage. From the callstack I can see that the Bitlocker driver is involved (fvevol.sys!FveFilterDeviceControl). Is your HDD encrypted with Bitlocker? Disable Bitlocker and see if this improves the situation.

Related Solutions

Windows – BootCKCL.etl file size & Session “Circular Kernel Context Logger” stopped due to the following error: 0xC0000188

0xC0000188 means log is full:

C:\Users\André>err 0xC0000188
# for hex 0xc0000188 / decimal -1073741432
  STATUS_LOG_FILE_FULL                                           ntstatus.h
# Log file space is insufficient to support this operation.
# 1 matches found for "0xC0000188"

Open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\Circular Kernel Context Logger and increase the the value MaxFileSize to 200.

Windows 10 boot suddenly takes 10-20 minutes

The WinLogonInit phase is slow.

What Happens in This Subphase
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 .

After applying the FullBoot.Boot.wpaprofile go to the Generic Events - Generic Fullboot table and expand the Microsoft-Windows-Winlogon provider, look for the tasks that belong together (same taskname but 1 Event with Start and 1 with Stop Opcode) and look at the time column and subtract the starttime from the endtime to get the entire duration. Now the task is very long.

In the sample, RequestCredentials (entering password) and AuthenticateUser (checking typed in data) takes too long.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – BootCKCL.etl file size & Session “Circular Kernel Context Logger” stopped due to the following error: 0xC0000188

Windows 10 boot suddenly takes 10-20 minutes

Related Question