performance - How can I identify the culprit of my slow Windows shutdown?

My computer is taking a very long time to shutdown.

How can I identify the culprit? I don't want to wait minutes for my computer to shutdown...

Is there a program I can use to track how long it takes to shutdown?

Answer

Windows provides Performance Counters as well as Event Tracing which allows applications to do performance analysis so that one can pin-point the cause of performance problems, amongst those that exist there is one outstanding toolkit: The Windows Performance Toolkit available in the Windows SDK.

In this toolkit you will find xbootmgr.exe, meant for Windows On/Off Transition Performance Analysis.

Although the above linked document goes into all the details for every on/off transition, here is the general idea about tracing and analyzing the shutdown transition using xbootmgr and the xperf GUI:

1. 
   

   Download the Windows SDK, then install the Windows Performance Toolkit using it.

   
   


2. 
   

   Open up a command prompt as an administrator, then run:

   
   

   
   

   cd %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit

   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   If you want help in the future, you can type xbootmgr -help as well as xperf /?.

   
   


4. 
   

   Do a reboot trace like this:

   
   

   
   

   xbootmgr -trace shutdown -traceFlags BASE+DIAG+LATENCY -noPrepReboot

   
   

   
   


5. 
   

   After the boot, it will generate a trace within two minutes.

   
   


6. 
   

   The trace has been saved in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit, you can drag it onto xperf.exe and it will be opened in a GUI.

   
   


7. 
   

   You will see a GUI with different graphs, the arrow at the left side allows you to add/remove graphs.

   
   


8. 
   

   Look at the graphs and see if you can identify anything out of the ordinary, you can select an interval and zoom in on it if you want to. Right click and unzoom when you want to see the whole.

   
   


9. 
   

   For each graph, you can right click to get summary tables for the currently selected interval.

   
   


10. 
    

    In these tables, sort by weight or by time to figure out which it is spending the most to. Please note that you can drag around columns, so for example the I/O table allows you to check out the highest using process as well as the highest using path.

    
    

    The divider (a yellow header column) makes it so that the columns right of it show the total for the columns left of it. So, if you have Path first and then Process, then you can open the tree for a file to see what processes have accessed it and then you get the totals for that process/file combination.

    
    


11. 
    

    You can find more information on how the graphs and tables function here.

    
    


12. 
    

    If you somehow need to go down to look into the stack traces; do another boot trace and append the -stackWalk profile parameter, set the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and right click on any graph and enable "Load Symbols". This will allow you to check what functions it's actually calling, in general you won't need this for a shutdown though; but it can allow for things like discovering that your firewall is interfering with your debugger as a programmer. Pretty nifty...

    
    

Good luck, I hope you can find the culprit. If not then drop the trace and we'll take a look for you...

_{Please note that DPCs are Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupts are Software Interrupts, both are related to drivers / hardware.}