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I'm wondering how different end-of-session protocols affect Windows Server performance or anything else. On our Win10 server, users can either "disconnect" or "sign out".

I sign out every time after a session, unless there's a long process running that I need to complete. This can take a while - I wait for 5-10 minutes on a "please wait for user profile service" blue screen. Logging on similarly takes me 10-15 minutes.

I learned that other users always use "disconnect", essentially always remaining logged in, largely to avoid the long sign-in/sign-out wait time that I experience. Is there any disadvantage to this approach, or can I adopt it as well? My intuition is that keeping 5-10 users perpetually logged in degrades the performance of the server or possibly costs our company money, but I have no evidence to back this up

3pitt
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  • How would it cost your company money? – joeqwerty Mar 16 '19 at 14:17
  • i thought some cloud providers charged by user or login time – 3pitt Mar 16 '19 at 14:26
  • Perhaps you should address the 10-15 minute logon performance issue. You're also not going to be able to differentiate between a session that the user disconnected, or a session that was disconnected from a network interruption. – Greg Askew Mar 16 '19 at 14:36
  • Ok, but let's assume that none of the disconnected sessions were caused by network problems; also aren't the effects the same? w.r.t. 10-15 min logon, my user profile has been removed and reinstalled to no avail. I agree the long logon period is troublesome. I've posted a separate question here: https://serverfault.com/questions/958572/logging-into-windows-server-via-rdc-takes-too-long – 3pitt Mar 16 '19 at 14:45

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Personally, I always "Logoff" from a RDP connection, in order to avoid various issues, the biggest one being that my password could expire and if it does while I'm still "connected" to a server, then my account would enter an "account lockout" loop as it would constantly try to authentify to that server.

Another issue that can be avoided is that some programs have issues when more than one instance of their process is running. So if User A connects to the server, launches said process, then "Disconnects", and User B connects later on and tries to launch the same process, he may encounter an error message.

And obviously, when you "Disconnect" from a server, all the resources you used when you were logged in are still in use and won't be freed until you do a "Logoff", which could affect the system in the long run depending on its specs, and how many users connected to it and haven't logged off.

womble
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Aura
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