delay at logon while applying your personal settings
Our application is creating a new Windows user in answer to each request. In space of one year hundred of thousands of new users are being added and subsequently deleted. We noticed that after a while our servers start to slow down while logging on a new user. The delay occurs when Windows displays "Applying your personal setting" message, taking 25 seconds on a used server as opposed to 5 seconds it takes on a brand new machine. Each time a user logs on it logs on using a brand new user account. We cleaned up the registry of any residual entries left over while adding and deleting a users but it made no difference. Is there any way to correct this problem without having to reinstall the OS?
June 24th, 2010 5:34pm

Our application is creating a new Windows user in answer to each request. In space of one year hundred of thousands of new users are being added and subsequently deleted. We noticed that after a while our servers start to slow down while logging on a new user. The delay occurs when Windows displays "Applying your personal setting" message, taking 25 seconds on a used server as opposed to 5 seconds it takes on a brand new machine. Each time a user logs on it logs on using a brand new user account. We cleaned up the registry of any residual entries left over while adding and deleting a users but it made no difference. Is there any way to correct this problem without having to reinstall the OS?
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June 24th, 2010 6:09pm

If I might ask, why does your app create/remove a user at logon? I think this issue might be rare enough that you would need to contact Microsoft PSS and see if they can help you. -- Mike Burr
June 24th, 2010 9:55pm

Hi , It seems to be that you need to delete this registry key from your Server HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProfileList Also try to delete your older accounts from AD because it will better for you as well. Regards. Shafaquat Ali.M.C.I.T.P Exchange 2007 M.C.I.T.P Windows Server 2008 M.C.T.S OCS Server 2007 R2
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June 24th, 2010 10:27pm

Chances are the registry still has references to old user profiles. I would re-evaluate your methodology of creating new user accounts. Instead, try mandatory profiles. Also, have you considered the security implications of allowing an application to create user profiles? This is a really, really bad design. View my MCP Certifications
June 24th, 2010 11:09pm

Our application is using Windows in a particular way. It is however secure enough since all the users are allowed to do is to run a instance of IE. Creating new users ensures the cookies cannot migrate from one session to another.The registries have been thoroughly cleaned but it made no difference.
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June 25th, 2010 1:58am

The registry have been thoroughly cleaned but it made no difference.
June 25th, 2010 2:04am

Hi, There are several possible causes. To narrow down the cause, let’s try the steps below: 1. Check the Default user profile folder, you may compare it with a working system. If it’s too large, try to delete and rebuilt one to test. 2. Is there any new software installed on this system? Or service, hardware. 3. Is there any GPO applied to this system? If any, check if they are changed. Thanks.This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
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June 28th, 2010 11:43am

One other issue that could be nailling you is fragmentation. If you think about it, you're constantly creating profiles and deleting them, so the disk subsystem is likely taking a terrible hit. If you're using a SAN, other servers may be having similar problems. Try running a Defragment by going to Start/Windows Jewel > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. If you're using Windows 2003, you may need to run several passes. It couldn't hurt to do the same with 2008, but it will likely repeat passes on its own. If this seems to solve your problem, then try something more proactive such as Executive Software's Diskeeper. It has made a world of difference for our environment. If you're running HyperV, they have another solution specifically for it.View my MCP Certifications
June 28th, 2010 3:01pm

Thank you far all answers posted so far. We tried all your suggestions including deleting all old users profiles, defragmentation, deleting content that accumulates over time in the default user profile, cleaning up registry (exported registry before/after, run a diff, deleted extra keys with regedit), GPOs, new software services. Nothing seems to make any difference.
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June 30th, 2010 3:43pm

Is this problem reproduceable? What type of hardware are you running this on? Is it virtualized? If you have multiple servers doing the same thing, but only this one has the problem, it's possible you have a hardware issue. Give us whatever extra details you can. Sometimes the small things matter.View my MCP Certifications
June 30th, 2010 3:56pm

New logons are going to be copied from the default user profile. If you have multiple users logging in at once, this can be a pretty big hit to the disk subsystem. Monitor your Avg Disk Queue Length for all drives and let us know what it seems to be. I am likely wrong, but I believe it shouldn't go over the number of disk spindles + 2. If you have a 3 disk RAID 5 array, then 5 should be the maximum. This method has always helped me find the source of disk bottlenecks. How big is the folder for the default user? How often are people logging in? View my MCP Certifications
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June 30th, 2010 4:08pm

We actually have about 20 servers and all suffers from the same problem. We are not using any virtualization solution, these are regular windows servers. For logging new users we are using a round robin scheme so on one server the users are being logged in one at the time. Each server handles a new user once every several minutes. Each server typically handles about 10-20 users a a time but the CPU is monitored to stay below 50%. The default user folder has about 1MB. We did try to delete most of the stuff, inlcuding index.dat which seems to be growing over time but did no help.
June 30th, 2010 4:49pm

Are there any startup scripts? In C:\Users\ are there a ton of profiles listed from all of the past logins, or do you script them to be cleaned up? Have you considered just using mandatory profiles from a network share? Are printers deployed? Are there startup scripts? We need more information about how this application works and the configuration of the servers in order to solve this. Also, the Avg. Disk Queue Length is extrememly important. Please find that out.View my MCP Certifications
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June 30th, 2010 5:30pm

There are no startup or logon scripts. No printers are deployed. The users profiles are being deleted programmatically so we hold only profile from the active users. From looking at the Avg. Disk Queue Length, we see brief spike when the user logs but which does not last more than 1 second. Subsequently in the long 25 seconds while Windows displays "Applying your personal settings" there seem to be no disk activity while the CPU does some work at 20% capacity. The way our application works, for each client request we create a new user, add the user to the local group, apply terminal session settings since we are using Remote Desktop Services, logon the user, load the user profile and than start a instance of internet explorer. All these steps are be done actually very fast, the slow down occurs after logon while displaying the "Applying your personal settings" message. When the user logs off, the user account is deleted along with the user profile folder. We noticed that over time lots of entries are being added in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. After deleting those entries we still see no improvement. As a double-check we also run delprof utility from the Windows Server 2003 Toolkit to delete old profiles. From what we noticed delprof.exe is removing unused user profiles and is cleaning the registry key mentioned above. One odd se we notice is the following: if we go to MyComputer/Properties/Advanced and click on UserProfile, it takes a long time (1-2 minutes) to bring up the results. It should not take that long to display 5-6 entries and sure enough this goes very fast on a new installed machine. I need to stress however that the registry have been cleaned ..
July 6th, 2010 10:48pm

For Windows 2008: Check C:\Users. For Windows 2003: Check C:\Documents and Settings\ How many folders exist? The applying your personal settings will always take a while when copying user profiles. This is especially true once Internet Explorer has been updated on a machine. The creation of a user profile is usually between 10 and 30 seconds, and sometimes more depending on profile settings being deployed. Your application is not operating in a standardized way, so it may be something you have to live with. If you're deploying printers, etc, take a look to see if these temporary users are within the scope of these policies. This should be considered for all policies. During the creation of the policy, the default user profile is copied over, and then all local policies, site policies, domain policies, and Organizational Unit policies are applied. This occurs in descending order. The time to apply these policies varies by contents. One thing you could do is compare the size of your default user profile to one of these temporary profiles. What size is each? Personally, I would use a mandatory profile instead so you're not having to rebuild one every time the new user accounts are logging in, or get rid of the account creation all together, a better option. View my MCP Certifications
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July 6th, 2010 11:04pm

In C:\Documents and Settings\ we see only the folders for current users (10-20 entries). Those folders created during past session have been deleted. We are not deploying printers or special policies. We compared the default user profile folder with the folders created for new users and they are similar, nothing stands out. What it looks odd to me is that the delay is not present on newly installed servers.
August 6th, 2010 1:02am

I saw you tried defragmentation, but have you tried Diskeeper? Try installing the trial version on the server and let it do a full defrag. It defragments on writes, not just after the fact. The only thing I can think of causing your issue at this point is going to be slowness of the disk, policies, or Windows just hates having thousand and thousands of users created and deleted. You can also try a gpresult to see what all policies are being applied to the system. Then, you can browse each one and make sure one of the settings isn't slowing you down. In the end of it all, though, I fear it's just the bad design that is biting you. 1. Install Diskeeper 30-day Trial. Defrag, and then test. 2. Use GPRESULT to get a list of all policies applied to the system. If the user accounts are not local users, then make sure that you use a user account that is in the same OU as the accounts that are automatically created. 3. Change the design of the system.View my MCP Certifications
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August 6th, 2010 3:02pm

After watching the processes running on our machine with Process Explorer we noticed that during logon winlogon.exe spawns a process called rundll32.exe. This one runs while the user logs on for about 20 seconds which is exactly the time delay we are trying to eliminate. Any ideas? Thank you.
August 6th, 2010 8:06pm

It's building the profile. Install Diskeeper 2010 Trial, defragment, check out the results, report back. You can't skip processes. This is why people have stopped lending help.View my MCP Certifications
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August 6th, 2010 8:44pm

We installed Diskeeper, run a manual defrag job and let it run in automatic mode over the weekend. Tested again on Monday but the problem is still there. Regarding policies: all user accounts are local users. I'm afraid changing the design of the system is not really an option there is simply to much code that depends on running the things the way they are now.
August 9th, 2010 4:31pm

Well, it turns out that the delay we see has nothing to do with creating/deleting users since we managed to reproduce it on a brand new server. The problem goes away if we disable ActiveX installation via group policies.
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August 9th, 2010 5:38pm

So it was essentially a Group Policy scoped to the Computer level instead of Users. Glad GPResult helped identify possible policies, and you were able to find the problem. I know this had to be frustrating you for a long, long time.View my MCP Certifications
August 9th, 2010 5:40pm

Could you please specify the settings more in detail. Exactly which changes in GPO's did you have te make to get rid of the problem or which settings were causing the problem? thnx, beew
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October 28th, 2010 4:39am

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