How to measure boot time

The big one that's likely to kill you is disk IO. Collecting both the transactions per second and the sectors read/written per second will give you a start on determining what you'll need on the SAN. Keep an eye on memory and pagefile usage, too, that can do bad things to your disk IO stats, and provisioning your VMs with some extra memory is simple.

Network is probably the next most important one, but that's pretty simple -- aggregate transfer and packets per second, make sure it's not too ridiculous.

CPU is the least likely bottleneck on a modern system, in my experience. I'd be inclined not to worry about it unless you've got multiple machines that are pegging their CPU consistently. Provisioning an extra VM server if you're running out of CPU is straightforward.

We are currently investigating SOPHOS speed issues and I have come up with the following suggestions which in our winxp sp3 environment has made a fair bit of difference:

1. Exclude these files at within the On-Access section:

   • c:\windows\system32\authz.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\drivers\srv.sys
   • c:\windows\system32\es.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\netman.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\oakley.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\pstorsvc.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\rasadhlp.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\regsvc.dll
   • c:\windows\system32\winipsec.dll They are startup files and aslong as you have full system scans running at some point, you shuold be fine.

2. The second thing to do is turn off checking for updates at startup. This is a tiny bit risky as thats a key point for new viruses can attack, but you can combat this by have regular 30 min checks for updates meaning you are never more than half an hour out. To turn of checking for updates do this:

alt text http://www.sophos.com/images/common/misc/27646.gif

After implementing these changes there was a noteable speed increase from power on to desktop.

I hope this helps.

Kip