Shut Down -Speed Up

fireberd said:

I have the "wait to kill" set to 5000, per instructions I found, but I still have about a 20 second shutdown time. Is there something else that needs to be set?

According to this tutorial make sure your system is NOT set to clear the pagefile at shutdown. If you open regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Change the value of ClearPageFile at Shutdown to a 0 IF the value is 1 (Option Three, Step 6.)

Virtual Memory Paging File - Clear at Shutdown - Vista Forums

If value is already at 0 try doing the Clean Startup to see if anything is interfering with shutdown.

fireberd said:

I have the "wait to kill" set to 5000, per instructions I found, but I still have about a 20 second shutdown time. Is there something else that needs to be set?

Hello Jack,

In addition, if you have hibernate enabled, then it could take about that long at shut down to save system memory to the hiberfil.sys file.

Hope this helps, :)
Shawn

I don't have Hibernate enabled (I don't use that).

I just tried it and it now shuts down (restart) in about 4 seconds after applying the utility you listed to change it to 2 seconds (and a restart). I'll take that.

Tnx/Jack

Well, if changing this registry key doesn't work for anyone out there, you need to apply this hotfix for it to work: WaitToKillServiceTimeout registry value does not work in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2

I have an old system with just 1.25 gigs of RAM. Actually what happens is when I use the system for a lot of time, all the Windows things like services' dlls and exes are paged onto the pagefile and the RAM is emptied for the applications in use. Once these applications are closed, darn Windows does not swap back these services back to the RAM unless and until needed. When the system is then shutdown, these services need to be shutdown as well, but in order to do so, they first need to be swapped back to the RAM from pagefile. This causes shutdown delays.

I first lowered down the value to 2000, but that didn't seem to work because every service was closed before those 2 seconds. The overall shutdown time was around 10-20 seconds which I hated coz I really need super fast shutdowns for some reason. I then lowered down it to 600. Now the shutdown takes around 7 sec which is pretty fine for me. I think there's no need of making these Windows services shutdown down properly coz they don't really have anything to save to the HDD which might result in data loss. Only the handles need to be closed while shutting down, which I suppose, is useless. I never had problems making these pesky services crash. They only make Windows run and provide special functions, so no need to shut them down with too much care, LOL.

Thank you for the addition Nilank. :)

As described in my last post, on low memory systems, swapping things back from the pagefile to the RAM in order to close handles to services during shutdown contributes to shut down time.

A solution can be disabling pagefile, but I DON NOT recommend doing so. Instead, setting the min pagefile size to the lowest number (16 MB) and setting the max to a number desired can "force" Windows to use as much as RAM as possible, thus making things stay in the RAM. Windows can automatically increase the pagefile size when required.

Virtual Memory Paging File - Change

Just tested this method. Works pretty well.

Warning: This can lead to fragmentation because the pagefile is resized again and again. To solve this problem, I have made a separate small partition and dedicated it completely to the pagefile. This solves the problem of fragmentation in my case.

Shawn I might have been doing this wrong - I have been doing the first two control sets so is just that last ref?? for Wait to kill??

Mine as I had told Two cables about

Hello John,

You only need to do the tutorial in the registry location below, and not what's in your screenshot. The ControlSet### keys are just backup versions of your CurrentControlSet key. :)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Thanks Shawn I'll reset the machines:)