SBS 2008 Slow Startup and Shutdown

In my initial RAID 10 tests, SBS 2008 booted in 1 minute 43 seconds and shut down in 4 minutes 10 seconds. Now that I’ve been running for a couple weeks, the shutdown time has remained constant, but the boot time has increased dramatically:  a good boot is 3 minutes 10 seconds; the next test took a whopping 10 minutes 15 seconds to get to the logon prompt, mostly “Applying computer settings.”

Reduce the Startup Time

A clue to the startup issue is in the System event log:  Service Control Manager event 7022, “The Windows SBS Manager service hung on starting.” That’s the first event after 6 1/2 minutes of no events.

There is also a warning event in the Application event log:  Winlogon 6006, “The winlogon notification subscriber <GPClient> took 551 second(s) to handle the notification event (CreateSession).”

A partner newsgroup thread indicated that this might be related to SBS Monitoring database performance, and suggested following the steps in this article:

Official SBS Blog:  SBS 2008 Console May Take Too Long to Display Alerts and Security Statuses, Display Not Available, or Crash

This basically runs a SQL script to add some indexes and statistics to the SBS Monitoring database, and it sets the CleanupPeriod to 30 (minutes, I assume).

After running that script, my startup was back to 3 minutes 10 seconds. However the SBS Manager hang was intermittent and fairly rare, so we’ll have to see if this actually fixes it.

Reduce the Shutdown Time

Although just over 4 minutes to shut down SBS 2008 is pretty good, there are articles that indicate it’s easy to speed that up. Apparently SBS 2008 is slow to shut down because Exchange gets tangled up with other services during shutdown. Following the advice in this post and this one, I added a group policy shutdown script to shut down Exchange services:

net stop msexchangeadtopology /y
net stop msftesql-exchange /y
net stop msexchangeis /y
net stop msexchangesa /y
net stop iisadmin /y

The shutdown script gets executed before the system stops the remaining services for the shutdown. You will even see “Shutting down Group Policy Client service” for the first 65 seconds or so, following by “Stopping Services”. Now the complete shutdown takes only 2 minutes 41 seconds. Much better, especially if the power is out and the UPS battery is draining.