MicrosoftWow what a wall of rants. I am happy that we have the dashboard but would like to join the following points
Claim 1: updates should not need any restarts
Reality check: it is there but only for Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition, all other do not support hotpatching. Not even Azure Stack HCI 21H2 - yet - where it would be even more useful as on a VM that will never see an UEFI POST.
Proposal: please elaborate why this is a feature reserved for a special edition of an OS. You achieved important things with enablement packages and made these achievements available for all modern OS. This should be a target for Windows 10 / 11 with the next release.
Claim 2: Updates consumes too many resources
reality check: the main issue I have with updates in the background that they are taking too many resources for a long period of time.
This is because the servicing (dism) runs with low priority and there is no user or GPO option to adjust it. It is a bad design. While the idea is to prevent users noticing the update process, the process takes a long time even on the most powerful machines. Have you recently seen how long a 4 core VM needs to install the 12-2021 CU for Windows Server 2019 / GUI or core. Ofc everything better than Windows Server 2016, but the same goes with clients.
During updates the CPU is easily busy with 2 or even 4 cores. The disk is doing pretty much nothing. Please compare the installation times of Windows 7 and 8 to current Windows 10 / 11. It was way faster on the same hardware.
Proposal:
- How about to do all servicing operations in RAM and then write back to the disk when finished? (at least when there is enough free RAM).
Claim 3: When an update for 21H2 has a size of few hundred MBs nearly 650 MB x64 and 305 MB for x86. So what takes so long to unpack and apply it via dism?
tldr: speed up the update process.
Reality check: that's an unfortunate fast, despite with every iteration of Windows the updates should become smaller, now with the enablement packages they grew in size again.
I love the enablement packages but they have some tradeoffs.
The 2004/21H1/21H2 x64 update package is nearly 100 MB bigger than the 1809 update, this even though it contains much more monthly CUs.
Proposal:
- introduce a setting in settings app and GPO / CSP to control the default priority mode of installing updates.
- try to make dism more multithreading. It is very slow even on most modern 5 GHz CPUs with lots of RAM and NVMe. It could literally take a minute or two.
we are not even talking about any security solution like Defender or 3rd party. This comes natively.
Performance References:
- pre Windows 10 versions
- Installing Windows from scratch takes less than 2 minutes on my machine, patching takes way longer, regardless the version and update size.
It is not acceptable that a system, especially ultrabooks with their 15 Watt TDP limits, needs literally ages to install cumulative updates.
I agree Deleted it is much about the CPU and specs but dism does not scale well at all.
Proposal: In a near future please recompile all Windows processes to be x64. With combined efforts we could make the next version of Windows a x64 native OS, where SysWOW64 becomes an optional feature. In theory, this would cut the OS and update size and installation time to nearly a half.
Proposal: Deploy updates with WIM or ESD, this would reduce the size due to compression and deduplication that should be more efficient than cab files. Isn't it?
When we apply an update or install Windows it would be possible (with adjustments) to apply the content of the wim / esd to the online disk and reboot to make changes effective.
Proposal: Disable System Restore on drive C by default. It is an uneccessary old tech, which produces overhead and fragmentation (even on SSDs). It recently had a security issue, MSRC adviced to disable it altogether.
However it is enabled by default and if you disable it manually to follow the MSRC, it will be re-renabled after an in-place upgrade.
It does not help in worst case scenarios anymore as the Windows registry is no longer part of the VSS snapshot.
In modern Windows OS the user can now uninstall updates without any system restore point via Windows RE, this is pretty solid.
Conclusion:
David_GuyerAriaUpdatedDeletedwould any of these ideas be in reach any time?
I know all my proposals sounds simple from outside. From what we see here and the feedback I agree with the one comment that we might need re-think the servicing system which seems to be unchanged (in the root) since Vista.
Sure I do not want to go back to XP where updates were nothing but cab files that overwrite existing files without any deeper logic, and most of all these were language specific.
However if you patch a Windows XP box with a modern PC you will notice that the installation of updates, with SSDs / NVMe and CPUs scales pretty well. It is super fast, especially with System Restore disabled.
If we dare to touch this and make it better we could avoid having systems on for hours. I also agree on the factor of environment and responsiblity, even though it is "offtopic".
