Remote shutdown freezes desktop

When i am doing a remote shutdown of some clients, the desktop-icons temporarily stop to respond to my clicks. This means, after a double-click on an icon or a single one in the taskbar nothing happens for a while. After some time there may be a reaction, but shortly after this everything is blocked again. When i want to lay 50 or 100 computers to sleep, it can take 20 minutes or more before i can use my admin-workstation again for normal work. Even doing this with 10 clients isn't fun.

I guess, netscan is watching the success of the shutdown-process intensively and so the cpu is not available for other purposes. And i am not quite sure if reducing the amount of threads or their runtime will make things better. And reducing them probably will slow down the initial scan and rescans.

I would appreciate very much some hints for speeding up the shutdowns.

Thanks

Bill

Actually the shut down is done in one thread, and this is probably not a CPU issue.

When you are doing it, do you choose the current account or specific account?

I'm using the specific (administrator)-account, because im logged in as normal user and shutting down needs more rights to succeed.

Can you try launching the network scanner under the administrator account (with runas) and then try the shutdown with use current account?

I need to know whether the freezes occur during the authentication stage or the actual shutdown operation. By launching the application as administrator, we avoid the authentication stage and see if that helps.

Hi Andrew,

just some minutes ago i was shutting down 60 workstations (netscan started as administrator and shutting down using "current account". I then experienced:

I got a message that the workstations were shut down successfully.
From that moment nothing happened when i doubleclicked an icon or clicked an icon in the taskbar (or minutes later for just a second), netscan stopped probing the live-display, but:

The task-manger i started before showed no exceptional heavy duty, just as before and it's graph was running smoothly on.
I could mark icons or bring windows to the front with avtual content (no graphic issues).
A citrix application in the background is showing messages.

But there was no starting applications from with doubleclick or activating windows in the taskbar. When i tried too much, i got a milky white transparent background and shortly after windows told me, that the explorer seemed to not respond and offered it's restart. I refused and closed netscan with the taskmanager (more than 20 minutes after the shutdown).

As soon netscan was closed some programs and tasks i clicked/started minutes before showed up and worked fine and i could use windows without any problems.

It seems to me, that netscan somehow blocks the processing of a great part of the system messages. Scanning the net with netscan on another client showed that the machines i targeted were really down for a while, so i think the work has been done, but netscan had difficulties to find back to normal life.

Hope you have an idea about it.


Bill

I have moved the shutdown calls to background threads for parallel processing.

Please try the new build and let me know how it works.

Hi Andrew,

sorry for my late reply, but due to much work and now 2 weeks vacation i'm currently not able to do much in this case.

First short tests showed that the threaded shutdown is running somehow smoother, but the mentioned strange behaviour is thill there. To my surprise another workstation (more powerful, but not too much) doesn't show this effect at all. Mayby something is interferring with netscan. I must confess, that on my normally used machine there are a loot of tools und tasks (monitoring etc.) running, which could have an effect. The other client is nearly naked.

As soon as i return to work, i will start to track things. Maybe this can take some time, because my boss also wants his problems to be solved. But i don't like computers doing things slowing me down (for a reason i don't understand) and i will keep working on it.

I sure will report when i know more. By now i can only thank you for your support, which, as always, was very fast and professional.

Bill

Now i'm quite sure that i found out, why the desktop of my workstation was freezing for sometimes up to 20 minutes when shutting down some or many other clients in my network.

Netscan was apparently interacting in this fatal way with an (older) version of the Kyocera KM-Net-Viewer, a printer monitoring utility. In the last days i had to bring up and down quite a lot of the clients i'm responsible for for maintenance reasons. I closed the printer-utility before those actions and everything worked fine without freezes or other occurances.

But, anyhow, the now multithreaded shutdown-process is really nice. No more countdown, just the message "40 computers have been shut down".

Thanks you very much for help and advice, Abdrew.

That's good to know, thank you for sharing your findings