Windows 7 Boot Performance

Martin | Aug 29, 2008 | Comments

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For the first time since its creation another member of the Windows 7 development team has taken the opportunity to write a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Michael Fortin who leads the Fundamentals feature team that is part of the Core Operating System group wrote about Boot Performance in general and Microsoft’s efforts to decrease the boot time and increase boot performance on the Windows plattform in general.

Michael adds a few interesting information, albeit general in nature, about the efforts in the Windows 7 development process. He mentions improvements in prefetching,

In terms of reading files from the disk, Windows 7 has improvements in the “prefetching” logic and mechanisms. Prefetching was introduced way back in Windows XP. Since today’s disks have differing performance characteristics, the scheduling logic has undergone some changes to keep pace and stay efficient. As an example, we are evaluating the prefetcher on today’s solid state storage devices, going so far as to question if is required at all. Ultimately, analysis and performance metrics captured on an individual system will dynamically determine the extent to which we utilize the prefetcher.

device and driver initialization,

As noted above, device and driver initialization can be a significant contributor as well. In Windows 7, we’ve focused very hard on increasing parallelism of driver initialization. This increased parallelism decreases the likelihood that a few slower devices/drivers will impact the overall boot time.

reducing the number of system services and their impact on the system

As an example Windows 7 effort, we are working very hard on system services. We aim to dramatically reduce them in number, as well as reduce their CPU, disk and memory demands. Our perspective on this is simple; if a service is not absolutely required, it shouldn’t be starting and a trigger should exist to handle rare conditions so that the service operates only then.

as well as improved diagnostics that aim to help the user who is facing the problems of a slow booting computer. One interesting graph that Michael embedded in the article was the mean boot time of millions of user systems. A majority of systems boots between 20 and 60 seconds but there are some that take more than 600 seconds to boot.

windows boot performance

To sum it up. Microsoft is trying hard to reduce system boot time by introducing a few measures that allow this. It would be interesting to know for how many Windows users system boot time was a issue from the beginning.

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