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Can anyone explain why the windows update process is so freakin slow? It's just sits there scanning for ages, and then installs are really slow as well. Downlo

by xxpor 5y ago

Can anyone explain why the windows update process is so freakin slow? It's just sits there scanning for ages, and then installs are really slow as well. Downloads seem fine. Is it not just asking for updates since x?

ToFab123 5y ago
Do you have a spinning rust disk?
- GrayShade 5y ago
  It's slow even on my PCIe 4 NVMe drive. I boot into Windows once a week or two and I often see it spending more than 5 minutes installing a single update package. This is even slower than apt and dpkg, props to them.
  - ToFab123 5y ago
    Your installation of Windows is that by any chance the installation that came with computer? Or is it a Windows that you have upgraded from a previous version (and perhaps that was upgraded from yet another previous version)? I never have these slow downs that I read others have. I always do a clean install from a USB stick (including deleting recovery partitions). I do this like once a year or 1 1/2 years when something is being released that is either a new version or what is we used to call a service packs. Windows sucks at upgrading. There is always something strange going on after upgrading. Things that not happens after a clean install. If it is looong time since you have performed a clean install, I recommend you to consider doing that.
    - GrayShade 5y ago
      I installed last year when I got the computer and drive, and it's still pretty clean since I don't really use Windows these days. Or was clean until I upgraded to 11 last week. But this has always been my experience. I remember reinstalling Windows 7 and waiting hours for Windows Update to finish. Even checking for updates could take 20 minutes.
      - ToFab123 5y ago
        yeah, endless hours spend waiting for Windows Update. It is not so bad anymore. The only thing I can think about comparing your setup to mine is that I rarely turns off my computer. If you only use your very infrequent and turn it off when not used. I wonder if Windows is doing all kinds of maintenance jobs every time you start your computer since it is off most of the time, and then when you manually hit windows update, it gets a bit busy working out the correct state of your computer Those jobs are on my computer distributed over days / weeks but wit you they run every time you turn on windows since it couldn't run them at their scheduled frequency since the computer was off. I am just speculating, but maybe try to turn on windows once in a while and leave it over night, to test if this improves things.
  - swarnie 5y ago
    That doesn't seem right. I also have a PCIe NVMe boot drive, typically i don't even notice updates until i go to shut my PC down in the evenings and windows tells me it'd like a few mins to do the updates. Same difference to me, i was shutting it down and walking away anyway
    - GrayShade 5y ago
      I notice them because I intentionally open Windows Update and install the available ones.
  - SixDouble5321 5y ago
    Not to diminish package managers, I don't think they are having to be quite as clever as Windows update, at least historically. I could be wrong, but I think they are more like dependency tree managers that also download and execute new installers.
    - forgotpwd16 5y ago
      No, they aren't clever. They're practical. There's no such thing as execution here. Packages are archives containing the entire files not differences. The manager downloads it, unpacks it, and adds/removes/replaces the package's files in the system.
      - GrayShade 5y ago
        They can also execute post-install or post-update scripts. And indeed, Linux package managers aren't as fancy as Windows Update is, but that fanciness isn't something I miss. My distro's package manager probably breaks my system if it loses power during an update. Even so, it's been one of the more reliable and pleasant to use programs I've encountered.
  - MikusR 5y ago
    Windows updates are released once a month.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  Interestingly, I still use magnetic drives as a second drive on my laptops for storing data.Unfortunately most modern laptops have only one drive (NVMe), excellent for performance and less so for durability. And you better not keep it off for a couple of months.
- xxpor 5y ago
  No, but where I notice it is on my work computer that is admittedly loaded down with corporate security nonsense. My personal computer doesn't have nearly as much of an issue, but on the other hand it's an always on desktop so it's doing most of its windows update work at 3 in the morning.
aquanext 5y ago
Yeah, honestly, I'll believe it when I see when it comes to faster updates on Windows. Whenever I have to update macOS even on a machine that's way, way behind, it's super simple and straightforward. On Windows, there's always hours of pain and installing endless updates over and over. Windows Update never seems to finish updating. Right after I finish installing everything, boom, it's found more updates. It's just absolutely horrifying and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Right after I finish installing everything, boom, it's found more updates. I've always thought that's because the newest ones are dependent on some of the second-newest ones, so it couldn't install them before the dependencies were installed. And the reason it throws those at you immediately, "boom", is that it hasn't really "found more updates" after installing the first set; it knew about these ones too, from looking through the list it made for the first update, and just held them back for a second round. Just my speculation, though, so could be totally fucking wrong.
- simooooo 5y ago
  imagine having to restart after an update.
- SixDouble5321 5y ago
  That process solves for the problem of only wanting some updates. The new way you get all or nothing. The situation that you bemoan is exceedingly rare by comparison to updating in general. The point is probably moot though in light of the changes to Windows update over the years. There are plenty of reasons to hate on Windows, I think update is one of the few things that works reasonably well. The contents of those updates is another story.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Because you're still using Windows 7
- tobias3 5y ago
  On Windows an admin can selectivly apply individual updates, which isn't possible on macOS, I think. The core algorithm that calculates the dependencies is horribly slow. They are working around that with update rollups and cumulative updates since Windows 10. There are multiple layers of snapshotting going on during updates (VSS + Transactional NTFS). Then for example "Update telemetry" scans all applications on the system and only gives you the option to upgrade to Windows 11 if it doesn't find anything incompatible. On Apple you just get the option to upgrade and stuff just stops working afterwards.
duskwuff 5y ago
On what version of Windows? Windows 7 and earlier had some issues where, as the size of the update catalog grew, the updater would start taking much longer to "scan for updates". This was eventually fixed in an update to Windows 7 -- but this still meant that you'd be waiting a very long time to install the first few rounds of updates to a fresh 7 install. That being said, Windows 7 is EOL. If you're still using it, please stop.
- initplus 5y ago
  Good old accidental exponential time complexity. Not caught in the initial release as there were not enough pending updates to notice the issue.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    And no tests.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    And but of course nobody's going to make the effort to internally test with super outdated installations (although a VM snapshot or two, or a new install, would've made it simple enough). Good point.
  - baq 5y ago
    quadratic is the worst IME. will get through moderate, perhaps even large test suites, sit in prod quietly waiting for the data set to grow and only then blow up.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Windows Server 2019, for a VM running on a server that had nothing else to do, PCIe 4 nvme SSD, over 10 minutes waiting for windows update to do its thing on reboot. I don’t mind so much that it takes time checking, downloading and installing updates, because that’s not downtime. My beef is with what happens once you reboot.
- whyoh 5y ago
  I have a new PC with a NVMe drive and Windows 10. Everything is fast on it, but a ~300MB monthly Windows update can easily take 2-3 minutes, plus a reboot. Usually a software install of this size would take no more than 20 seconds. This has been my experience with Windows updates for the last 10 years or so, on different PCs and different Windows versions. It's just slow (and it's definitely the installation phase, not the downloading).
hulitu 5y ago
Windows cannot overwrite files which are in use. I guess this complicates a bit the issue. But they are working on GUI "improvements" which nobody asks so it will take a while until they improve the situation.
- garethrowlands 5y ago
  It can rename file that are in use though.
dilawar 5y ago
https://dilbert.com/strip/2010-03-29 https://dilbert.com/strip/2010-03-29
SixDouble5321 5y ago
Historically there were CPU intensive operations, I assume to trade compute time for bandwidth. I am not sure how much of that still exists though since updates have become all-or-nothing blobs.
the8472 5y ago
Last time I looked at the update performance in windows 10 the issue was that the installers for each of the patches replaced files sequentially, that sequential execution in turn got delayed by single-threaded antivirus. It could be a lot faster if they parallelized the file operations or deferred the antivirus.
cm2187 5y ago
My thought exactly. I would take a 2GB monthly update with a simple swap of the assemblies that would take 2 seconds and a reboot over the current agonising update process.
- KMag 5y ago
  Honestly, only kernel updates should require host restarts. Linux and BSD have had this for ages. Maybe have a flag that security updates use to flag any process using a vulnerable DLL as needing an eventual restart, and then have an administrative setting for restarting vulnerable processes after a certain period of time, at a convenient hour.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Note that Linux can do kernel updates with a reboot.
    - bkor 5y ago
      I think you meant to say _without_ a reboot, no?
      - zibzab 5y ago
        Yes :)
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      Windows used to support rebootless kernel updates too, but for some reason they stopped doing it.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      kexec is for all intents and purposes a reboot though, if that's what you're thinking of. Granted, you skip the EFI/POST part but you still lose all of your state. Otherwise, are there any distros regularly using ksplice?
  - bkor 5y ago
Const-me 5y ago
When I noticed installing or upgrading software was slow, and checked resource monitor, in 60% of cases it was windows built-in antivirus consuming all CPU time.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Yes, I have noticed that too. But the windows update process itself also sits there for minutes using 60%+ CPU.
webmobdev 5y ago
I believe that BigTech started releasing huge updates to normalise having an always-on internet connection during updates and normalised the slow update process for the opportunity it provides them to mine and analyse all data on your computer. Often an update is the only time when they can (and do) reset and toggle all the privacy settings back to their favour, and then do on device analysis (like collecting meta data of all your files or analysing your photos etc.). They can then send the data back to their servers to add to your profile they have on you. That's why I always make it a point to immediately switch off my router after downloading an OS update and starting an install. (Both Windows and macOS spend a lot of time in indexing your disks and doing all sorts of on-device "AI" analysis to provide some specific feature. And both collect a lot of your data for this.)
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  i think this is not far fetched what linux distro do you recommend?
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    I prefer FreeBSD and Debian.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    After several years ... I have come to the conclusion distro wars are pointless. These days, I just have an old XUbuntu installation that has been consistently upgraded since 16.04, and it just works. Some may consider Ubuntu-clones to be "beginner's distros", ultimately, though, I like how it gets out of your way, apt works well, and I can focus on being productive. Doesn't mean you have to use all they do. I happily work emacs-based and in i3...
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      thanks for that, it’s been years since I tried xubuntu and “just works” is a big selling point.
glandium 5y ago
It's gotten a lot faster recently. What's still slow, though, is macOS's updates.
lbriner 5y ago
This is a massive problem for large windows hypervisors. We have to shutdown around 20 vms for about 40 minutes for the host to reboot after updates. We are looking to move to a Linux host instead but that is a big up-front cost to get the same size machine, move the VMs across and remove the old host.
- tatersolid 5y ago
  Live VM migration is a thing on Hyper-V and host maintenance is its primary use case (as well as load leveling)
technion 5y ago
Last time I got frustrated by Microsoft update time, I created a PR for their update documentation while I was sitting there watching it that described how long it took. They merged it. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-Exchange/pull/2703 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-Exchange/pull/27...
- xxpor 5y ago
  That genuinely made my morning.
ChrisRR 5y ago
Exactly. I can update linux in a matter of seconds, the longest part is downloading the updates.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
Even installing...just doesn't make sense why they're so slow. I have a pretty respectable system. i9-9900K, 32 GB of RAM, and Windows 10 is installed on an NVMe that can read/write at up to 3 gigabytes/sec (Yes, gigaBYTES!). A 200 MB update should take a fraction of a second. Even if it's actually applying a delta and not just simply overwriting files, I can't imagine it should take more than a couple seconds.

by xxpor 5y ago

ToFab123 5y ago

Do you have a spinning rust disk?

GrayShade 5y ago
It's slow even on my PCIe 4 NVMe drive. I boot into Windows once a week or two and I often see it spending more than 5 minutes installing a single update package. This is even slower than apt and dpkg, props to them.
- ToFab123 5y ago
  Your installation of Windows is that by any chance the installation that came with computer? Or is it a Windows that you have upgraded from a previous version (and perhaps that was upgraded from yet another previous version)? I never have these slow downs that I read others have. I always do a clean install from a USB stick (including deleting recovery partitions). I do this like once a year or 1 1/2 years when something is being released that is either a new version or what is we used to call a service packs. Windows sucks at upgrading. There is always something strange going on after upgrading. Things that not happens after a clean install. If it is looong time since you have performed a clean install, I recommend you to consider doing that.
  - GrayShade 5y ago
    I installed last year when I got the computer and drive, and it's still pretty clean since I don't really use Windows these days. Or was clean until I upgraded to 11 last week. But this has always been my experience. I remember reinstalling Windows 7 and waiting hours for Windows Update to finish. Even checking for updates could take 20 minutes.
    - ToFab123 5y ago
      yeah, endless hours spend waiting for Windows Update. It is not so bad anymore. The only thing I can think about comparing your setup to mine is that I rarely turns off my computer. If you only use your very infrequent and turn it off when not used. I wonder if Windows is doing all kinds of maintenance jobs every time you start your computer since it is off most of the time, and then when you manually hit windows update, it gets a bit busy working out the correct state of your computer Those jobs are on my computer distributed over days / weeks but wit you they run every time you turn on windows since it couldn't run them at their scheduled frequency since the computer was off. I am just speculating, but maybe try to turn on windows once in a while and leave it over night, to test if this improves things.
- swarnie 5y ago
  That doesn't seem right. I also have a PCIe NVMe boot drive, typically i don't even notice updates until i go to shut my PC down in the evenings and windows tells me it'd like a few mins to do the updates. Same difference to me, i was shutting it down and walking away anyway
  - GrayShade 5y ago
    I notice them because I intentionally open Windows Update and install the available ones.
- SixDouble5321 5y ago
  Not to diminish package managers, I don't think they are having to be quite as clever as Windows update, at least historically. I could be wrong, but I think they are more like dependency tree managers that also download and execute new installers.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    No, they aren't clever. They're practical. There's no such thing as execution here. Packages are archives containing the entire files not differences. The manager downloads it, unpacks it, and adds/removes/replaces the package's files in the system.
    - GrayShade 5y ago
      They can also execute post-install or post-update scripts. And indeed, Linux package managers aren't as fancy as Windows Update is, but that fanciness isn't something I miss. My distro's package manager probably breaks my system if it loses power during an update. Even so, it's been one of the more reliable and pleasant to use programs I've encountered.
- MikusR 5y ago
  Windows updates are released once a month.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Interestingly, I still use magnetic drives as a second drive on my laptops for storing data.Unfortunately most modern laptops have only one drive (NVMe), excellent for performance and less so for durability. And you better not keep it off for a couple of months.
xxpor 5y ago
No, but where I notice it is on my work computer that is admittedly loaded down with corporate security nonsense. My personal computer doesn't have nearly as much of an issue, but on the other hand it's an always on desktop so it's doing most of its windows update work at 3 in the morning.

aquanext 5y ago

Yeah, honestly, I'll believe it when I see when it comes to faster updates on Windows. Whenever I have to update macOS even on a machine that's way, way behind, it's super simple and straightforward. On Windows, there's always hours of pain and installing endless updates over and over. Windows Update never seems to finish updating. Right after I finish installing everything, boom, it's found more updates. It's just absolutely horrifying and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Right after I finish installing everything, boom, it's found more updates. I've always thought that's because the newest ones are dependent on some of the second-newest ones, so it couldn't install them before the dependencies were installed. And the reason it throws those at you immediately, "boom", is that it hasn't really "found more updates" after installing the first set; it knew about these ones too, from looking through the list it made for the first update, and just held them back for a second round. Just my speculation, though, so could be totally fucking wrong.
simooooo 5y ago
imagine having to restart after an update.
SixDouble5321 5y ago
That process solves for the problem of only wanting some updates. The new way you get all or nothing. The situation that you bemoan is exceedingly rare by comparison to updating in general. The point is probably moot though in light of the changes to Windows update over the years. There are plenty of reasons to hate on Windows, I think update is one of the few things that works reasonably well. The contents of those updates is another story.
mavhc 5y ago
Because you're still using Windows 7
tobias3 5y ago
On Windows an admin can selectivly apply individual updates, which isn't possible on macOS, I think. The core algorithm that calculates the dependencies is horribly slow. They are working around that with update rollups and cumulative updates since Windows 10. There are multiple layers of snapshotting going on during updates (VSS + Transactional NTFS). Then for example "Update telemetry" scans all applications on the system and only gives you the option to upgrade to Windows 11 if it doesn't find anything incompatible. On Apple you just get the option to upgrade and stuff just stops working afterwards.

duskwuff 5y ago

On what version of Windows? Windows 7 and earlier had some issues where, as the size of the update catalog grew, the updater would start taking much longer to "scan for updates". This was eventually fixed in an update to Windows 7 -- but this still meant that you'd be waiting a very long time to install the first few rounds of updates to a fresh 7 install. That being said, Windows 7 is EOL. If you're still using it, please stop.

initplus 5y ago
Good old accidental exponential time complexity. Not caught in the initial release as there were not enough pending updates to notice the issue.
- hulitu 5y ago
  And no tests.
- exikyut 5y ago
  And but of course nobody's going to make the effort to internally test with super outdated installations (although a VM snapshot or two, or a new install, would've made it simple enough). Good point.
- baq 5y ago
  quadratic is the worst IME. will get through moderate, perhaps even large test suites, sit in prod quietly waiting for the data set to grow and only then blow up.
cm2187 5y ago
Windows Server 2019, for a VM running on a server that had nothing else to do, PCIe 4 nvme SSD, over 10 minutes waiting for windows update to do its thing on reboot. I don’t mind so much that it takes time checking, downloading and installing updates, because that’s not downtime. My beef is with what happens once you reboot.
whyoh 5y ago
I have a new PC with a NVMe drive and Windows 10. Everything is fast on it, but a ~300MB monthly Windows update can easily take 2-3 minutes, plus a reboot. Usually a software install of this size would take no more than 20 seconds. This has been my experience with Windows updates for the last 10 years or so, on different PCs and different Windows versions. It's just slow (and it's definitely the installation phase, not the downloading).

hulitu 5y ago

Windows cannot overwrite files which are in use. I guess this complicates a bit the issue. But they are working on GUI "improvements" which nobody asks so it will take a while until they improve the situation.

garethrowlands 5y ago
It can rename file that are in use though.

dilawar 5y ago

https://dilbert.com/strip/2010-03-29 https://dilbert.com/strip/2010-03-29

SixDouble5321 5y ago

Historically there were CPU intensive operations, I assume to trade compute time for bandwidth. I am not sure how much of that still exists though since updates have become all-or-nothing blobs.

the8472 5y ago

Last time I looked at the update performance in windows 10 the issue was that the installers for each of the patches replaced files sequentially, that sequential execution in turn got delayed by single-threaded antivirus. It could be a lot faster if they parallelized the file operations or deferred the antivirus.

cm2187 5y ago

My thought exactly. I would take a 2GB monthly update with a simple swap of the assemblies that would take 2 seconds and a reboot over the current agonising update process.

KMag 5y ago
Honestly, only kernel updates should require host restarts. Linux and BSD have had this for ages. Maybe have a flag that security updates use to flag any process using a vulnerable DLL as needing an eventual restart, and then have an administrative setting for restarting vulnerable processes after a certain period of time, at a convenient hour.
- zibzab 5y ago
  Note that Linux can do kernel updates with a reboot.
  - bkor 5y ago
    I think you meant to say _without_ a reboot, no?
    - zibzab 5y ago
      Yes :)
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Windows used to support rebootless kernel updates too, but for some reason they stopped doing it.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    kexec is for all intents and purposes a reboot though, if that's what you're thinking of. Granted, you skip the EFI/POST part but you still lose all of your state. Otherwise, are there any distros regularly using ksplice?
- bkor 5y ago

Const-me 5y ago

When I noticed installing or upgrading software was slow, and checked resource monitor, in 60% of cases it was windows built-in antivirus consuming all CPU time.

xxpor 5y ago
Yes, I have noticed that too. But the windows update process itself also sits there for minutes using 60%+ CPU.

webmobdev 5y ago

I believe that BigTech started releasing huge updates to normalise having an always-on internet connection during updates and normalised the slow update process for the opportunity it provides them to mine and analyse all data on your computer. Often an update is the only time when they can (and do) reset and toggle all the privacy settings back to their favour, and then do on device analysis (like collecting meta data of all your files or analysing your photos etc.). They can then send the data back to their servers to add to your profile they have on you. That's why I always make it a point to immediately switch off my router after downloading an OS update and starting an install. (Both Windows and macOS spend a lot of time in indexing your disks and doing all sorts of on-device "AI" analysis to provide some specific feature. And both collect a lot of your data for this.)

jazzyjackson 5y ago
i think this is not far fetched what linux distro do you recommend?
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I prefer FreeBSD and Debian.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  After several years ... I have come to the conclusion distro wars are pointless. These days, I just have an old XUbuntu installation that has been consistently upgraded since 16.04, and it just works. Some may consider Ubuntu-clones to be "beginner's distros", ultimately, though, I like how it gets out of your way, apt works well, and I can focus on being productive. Doesn't mean you have to use all they do. I happily work emacs-based and in i3...
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    thanks for that, it’s been years since I tried xubuntu and “just works” is a big selling point.

glandium 5y ago

It's gotten a lot faster recently. What's still slow, though, is macOS's updates.

lbriner 5y ago

This is a massive problem for large windows hypervisors. We have to shutdown around 20 vms for about 40 minutes for the host to reboot after updates. We are looking to move to a Linux host instead but that is a big up-front cost to get the same size machine, move the VMs across and remove the old host.

tatersolid 5y ago
Live VM migration is a thing on Hyper-V and host maintenance is its primary use case (as well as load leveling)

technion 5y ago

Last time I got frustrated by Microsoft update time, I created a PR for their update documentation while I was sitting there watching it that described how long it took. They merged it. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-Exchange/pull/2703 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-Exchange/pull/27...

xxpor 5y ago
That genuinely made my morning.

ChrisRR 5y ago

Exactly. I can update linux in a matter of seconds, the longest part is downloading the updates.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

Even installing...just doesn't make sense why they're so slow. I have a pretty respectable system. i9-9900K, 32 GB of RAM, and Windows 10 is installed on an NVMe that can read/write at up to 3 gigabytes/sec (Yes, gigaBYTES!). A 200 MB update should take a fraction of a second. Even if it's actually applying a delta and not just simply overwriting files, I can't imagine it should take more than a couple seconds.