Long shutdown times in Windows 7

Question

I'm experiencing long shutdown times in Windows 7 Professional on newly built machines. After joining to a domain, they take over ten minutes to shut down. There is almost no software installed besides VNC and Office 2010. I ran a shutdown trace with Windows Performance Recorder and generated a graph of what's running during these long shutdowns. Most of the shutdown processes occur within the first minute or so and then wininit.exe (blue) and System (orange).

So how do I go about reducing shutdown times in this scenario?

Answer 1

look at the summary of the disk graph. I can see you have a lot of disk IO.

Maybe you clear the pagefile at shutdown.

To check it, open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management, locate the value ClearPageFileAtShutdown and make sure the value is set to 0.

This can cause such a slowdowns.

Answer 2

By default on shutdown, Windows waits 12 seconds per each active application to close before forcing it. You can try tweaking the wait time to see if you speed up the shutdown process. You need to open regedit and go to this location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Then right click on WaitToKillServiceTimeout and click on Modify, then add the desired value in milliseconds. Any value between 1-20 seconds (1000-20000) works without problems.