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I wish to reduce the time taken by our computer group policy. How can I find out which scripts of which group policy are run when I boot a computer, and how much time they take each? And how do I find out how much time software installation takes for each individual policy?

We have about 40 group policies of which more than 10 are using computer startup scripts.

I already turned up the verbosity and when I boot a computer I see the message "Applying Software Installation policy", but with no further details on which software or policy is being processed.

The Windows Event viewer logs for group policy shows two events corresponding exactly to the time the above message was shown:

Event 4018 Starting Startup script for HM\DEVELOP$.

Event 5018 Completed Startup script for HM\DEVELOP$ in 21 seconds.

There aren't any group policy events in between.

All software is up to date. This makes me think it is not actually an issue with software installation, but with the computer startup scripts. Am I right?

Some of our computers are connected through a VPN with a fast internet connection. On these computers the same events are logged, but it takes 64 seconds. We feel this a bit too long.

I assume the event logs mean that each and every computer startup script is run during this time. This is not detailed enough to find the scripts that take the largest amount of time.

I already ran each of the scripts individually, but none of them takes a noticeable amount of time (command window shows and is quickly gone).

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What you need is Microsofts XPERF tool to track startup times.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2012/06/09/slow-boot-slow-logon-sbsl-a-tool-called-xperf-and-links-you-need-to-read.aspx

Once you've got it working it will point a big finger at exactly what is causing your slow logons, from there you can look at identifying the underlying cause.

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    This was very helpful and answers my question. Using this I found that ClientAgent.vbs of "Windows SBS CSE Policy" takes up most of the time, namely 2 x 10s on our local machine. This looks like a network timeout, but further investigating this is another question. One addition to the blog: you need to download the Windows Performance Toolkit, but for Windows 8 this is now part of the "Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit" download. Instead of "xperf view" it now uses Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA).
    – Henno Vermeulen
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 10:23
  • After turning off this policy, startup scripts take only about one second and the computer connected through VPN starts up very quickly. I can't find good information on whether it's safe to disable this policy. I'll just keep it turned off until we run in some kind of trouble...
    – Henno Vermeulen
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 13:02
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    ClientAgent.vbs installs a clientside extension (.MSI) to allow additional settings to be configured on the system. This is specific to SBS and I've never actually bothered to look up what the settings are. Personally I don't think you need them and suspect you will find there is no harm from disabling this policy. What you may find is that a new computer needs the MSI running once to allow these extensions to run, but I see no need for it to be run on every startup. If you do just run it once when you build the machine, you won't need the policy.
    – Patrick
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 13:34
  • Ok thank you. This is also what I have learned from a few google searches, but I found it impossible to look up what exactly these settings are. It looks like the SBS-specific client-side extension is installed by copying a .dll file so I also figured that it would probably work fine for existing machines bu may need to be temporarily enabled again when installing a new computer to the domain.
    – Henno Vermeulen
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 14:29

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