A Quick Look at Soluto
It has been a long time since I last looked at software to improve boot speeds (“Windows Startup Tuning” from December ‘08). A new option recently crossed my radar though and it has some interesting wrinkles.
For starters, Soluto is probably the prettiest little startup manager you’ve ever used for Windows. Definitely a non-traditional GUI with lots of whiz-bang effects. Be sure to explore when you first start it up. Notice what happens when you hover over various objects to find all the options, buttons and knobs.
Install it, reboot and watch it analyze and time the boot process. It will categorize all the startup stuff as “No- brainer – remove from boot”, “potentially removable”, “Required” and then finally “removed.” The software collects and aggregates everyone’s decisions and can show you what others have chosen. Hopefully they choose wisely…
The No-brainer items you can opt to delay them to start after the boot or just pause them. If you pause them you have to remember to start them manually when you need them (a lot of the silly little tray apps can quite safely be paused). If you hover over an item you get more information, including stats on what other folks have done with it (aka the “wisdom of the crowds”):
From there you can choose Pause, Delay or click “Advanced for even more info.
Pretty cool, eh? Just work through all the startup items and decided what you can pause and delay. Reboot and see how it works out. There’s a History option at the bottom of the Soluto screen that will show you a historical graph of your boot times.
I’d suggest not getting too aggressive on the first try. I ended up with a dramatically faster boot but some odd side-effects due to my over-aggressive ways. Fortunately, the UI displays what you’ve paused/disabled so you can re-enable them all back to boot and then try again (The FAQ says the next version will have a one-button reset which will be nice!).
Soluto’s goal is to bring an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, killer technology, and the wisdom of the crowd. Soluto’s software combines low-level driver technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. All this data is gathered in Soluto’s PC Genome, a knowledgebase of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.
IIS 6 and Worker Process Recycling
Many moons ago we had a web app with a 3rd party control that appeared to leak memory over time. The web server was IIS 5 (Windows 2000) and at the time it seemed like the easiest way to work around the leak was to simply restart IIS every night with a scheduled call to iisreset.exe.
Years later we’re running IIS 6 (Windows 2003) and still restarting it every night. Like many maintenance tasks, it became a habit. Just one more box to check when standing up a new server.
Well, the problem with using our old iisreset /restart method on IIS6 is that it logs a ton of event log events – some of them errors. I’m trying to introduce some automation into log watching and those errors finally became annoying this week. I headed over to serverfault.com and asked What’s the Friendly Way to Restart IIS?
The first response gave me a link to a Microsoft TechNet article on Restarting IIS (IIS 6) and I found the article reasonably helpful. Some clicking around from there brought me to the Configuring Worker Processes for Recycling article and then the light bulb went on. Ah ha! I’d never quite realized how much I could do with the Application Pools.
There’s a lot of power in those Application Pools – and a bit of confusion. For instance, one of the options is “Recycle worker processes (in minutes).” This defaults to a value of 29 hours(!) which caught me a bit by surprise. Especially after checking the online help:
Inactivity? So it only restarts after 29 hours of inactivity?!? I checked all the MSDN and TechNet articles I could find but didn’t really see anything else that said the “inactivity” part. I did find an IIS MVP saying that was wrong though. I did some testing and can confirm that it is a true timer, not an inactivity timer – which can make things pretty rough on your users if you are relying on IIS sessions.
Did I mention this is on by default? Suddenly some odd bug reports begin to make sense… I very quickly visited all my servers and turned it off. Good grief.
For now I’m going with the “idle timer” option. I’ll have the worker processes simply shut down after 2 hours of idle time. The down side is the first person in after the shutdown will have a brief pause as the w3p process spins back up… but it seems the least risky of the options; assuming it fires once in a while so we don’t actually run out of memory (assuming that’s even an issue all these years later).
I’ve turned on the Worker Process recycling logging options and will monitor for bit (note: logging is off by default).
Educational!
Windows Startup Tuning
I’ve been playing with a couple different ways of managing my Windows computers’ start times recently. My goal is to go from off to usable as fast as possible. Here’s a quick look at some of the tools I’ve been using.
For a quick and easy way to manage what is going to run at start time try Windows Defender. It is a default part of Vista and easily added to XP. Fire it up, go to the Tools menu and click on “Software Explorer.” Change the Category option at the top to “Startup Programs” and have a look.
You can click on items in the left column to get more details about them displayed in the right column. You can also Remove, Disable or Enable each item – I’d suggest first using Disable. If, after a few reboots everything is good then go ahead and Remove.
Want to get a really hard core view of what’s starting up? Close down Defender and go download SysInternal’s AutoRuns program and prepare to be overwhelmed!
Caution: Don’t go mucking about if you don’t know what you’re doing. This one shows everything that is going to start and you’ll want to keep in mind that you di want many of those starting to have a functional machine.
I guess I should also mention good ol’ msconfig as another option. This one has been around since the Windows 98 days and is still a decent option. From your start menu choose run and type msconfig and hit enter. Click on the “Startup” tab and there ya go.
Now that we have a handle on what’s running the next step is to change the timing of things and that’s where Startup Delayer comes in handy. I just started using this one a couple weeks ago and love it.
While I have some programs running at startup that I want to keep there they really don’t need to be available for use immediately. Waiting a minute or two for Dropbox, for example, won’t hurt anything – and the fewer things trying to all start at once the faster the startup and the less time I need to wait to actually use the computer.
You have a list of the programs at the top and there’s a (initially blank) timeline at the bottom. Just drag programs from the list to a spot in the timeline to schedule their startup delay. It really is just that simple.
In the picture above, each of the little vertical bars represents a scheduled start delay. It might take a few trials and reboots, but this one really does make a noticeable difference.
Any other good startup management utilities that I might find useful?
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