OK so I think I finally figured out what's going on, and it has NOTHING to do with iPXE or iSCSI. I purchased and setup an identical Intel NUC (literally copy-pasted the disc image and booted it up) and it does not suffer from the problem. There is only one thing different between the two machines - the remote control receiver unit. The newest NUC uses a standard MCE IR receiver and when shutdown remotely, shuts down in less than 15 seconds. The first NUC uses a SnapStream Firefly RF remote and when shutdown remotely takes 5-8 minutes. The really weird part, if you shut it down locally, it shuts down in less than 15 seconds. I know that's the problem, because I unplugged the receiver and did a remote shutdown, and it took 11 seconds. So now at this point I am either going to replace the RF receiver with a different one (which I was already considering doing it anyways) or use pstools to initiate the command "locally." More than likely, I am just gonna toss that old RF remote.
Steve Cross [email protected] On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Steve Cross <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the good suggestions, definitely some good ideas. I did try > increasing the write back cache from 128 to 512 (I can't spare any > more than that on this server), but it did not help any. I disabled > windows search service to see if it was trying to index and there was > no change. I also disabled the pagefile and it didn't seem to make a > difference. I am still seeing 5-8 minute shut down time vs. 60 second > startup time. > > I have also been doing some performance monitoring and there is > basically 0 device activity after the first minute or so of shutdown, > so it leads me to believe that something on the system itself is > causing the shutdown process to hang. > > Since this is the kid's HTPC, I don't get too much time to play around > with it but I have a second NUC (identical model) that'll be here > today and it's going to have the iSCSI setup. I am going to see if > there are any bios settings that might make a difference, and try to > do some more debugging. > > Steve Cross > [email protected] > > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Andrew Bobulsky <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Steve Cross <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> Hey everybody, >>> >>> Been a little while since I posted on here. I finally got my Intel >>> NUCs that I wanted to get and they run great. Got them up and running >>> with iSCSI and everything is great - except shutdown time. The system >>> will go from power off to running windows in 60 seconds, but it takes >>> 6-8 minutes to shut down and I have NO clue why. This is quite >>> annoying because whenever I do have to shutdown my iSCSI server, I >>> want to make sure that all clients are cleanly shutdown first and this >>> is quite an insane length of time for a very clean install of Windows >>> 7 to shut down. I was wondering if it could have anything to do with >>> iSCSI, or if perhaps there may be some suggestions (not directly >>> related to iPXE) that you might could offer. >>> >>> Thanks in advance! >>> >>> Steve Cross >>> [email protected] >> >> >> Hello Steve, >> >> During Windows shutdown, aside from general write cache buffer >> flushing, sometimes the process of reconciling the pagefile can slow >> things down, too. >> >> I can suggest that, if you really want to debug this issue from the >> Windows side, you could run Sysinternals' Process Monitor... though it >> occurs to me that while the tool supports boot-time monitoring in >> addition to running on a live system, I have no idea how it would play >> out for shutdown. >> >> As a general rule, I like to disable the swap file on iSCSI-booted >> systems, or at least move the page file and hibernation files to a >> local disk. >> >> You can disable the swap file from the GUI as normal, and the >> hibernation file can be shut off by running >> >> C:\> powercfg /h off >> >> from an elevated command prompt. >> >> This may not fix your problem at all, but I thought I'd throw in my >> two cents as to where I would start, at least on the Windows side. >> >> Additionally, on the iSCSI target, make sure it's configured with at >> least a reasonable amount of write-back cache; say a gig or so. That >> really speeds up buffer flushing on the initiator side (or I'm >> suffering from the placebo effect, but I swear it works :P). >> >> Cheers, >> Andrew Bobulsky _______________________________________________ ipxe-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ipxe.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/ipxe-devel
