Checking for updates take over 10 hours and installing taking over 24 hours!

[thenew3]

We’ve been using batchpatch for almost 2 years and really love it. However over the last two to three months we’re having some issues with checking and installing updates on some of our servers.

We manage about 150 windows 2012/2012R2 and about 8 windows 2008 R2 servers with batchpatch. It is setup to search for updates directly from microsoft. Up till two or three months ago, the check for update process usually takes less than 5 minutes to run on all hosts. But lately about a dozen hosts can take anywhere up to 10 hours to do the check for update phase. After checking for updates, those hosts also take anywhere up to 24 hours to do the download and install update phase.

The hosts seem to change month to month, so it’s not the same hosts each month that’s experiencing this issue.

If we manually RDP to the host and manually check for updates, it finishes in a minute or two like usual, similarly installing updates directly from the host only takes a few minutes.

We have a 1gbps link to internet, and all hosts run on high speed SSD SAN’s so bandwidth and system resources are not an issue.

This only started recently. We’re on version 2016.09.14.14.21

any idea what’s causing this and how to fix it?

[doug]

This doesn’t really sound like an issue with BatchPatch, considering that the BP code has not changed, and considering that the issue appears to affect only some servers, and the servers that are affected are different each time, and no other customers are reporting anything similar.

I know you don’t have any Windows 7 targets, but this sounds not-too-dissimilar from what Windows 7 users have been experiencing for more than a year now with slow Windows Updates, due to some issues with the OS that Microsoft has continued to work on fixing all of this time. I would suggest you have a look at this posting just to get an idea of what was going on there, just in case there might be any potential relationship to what you’re currently seeing.

Checking for Available Windows Updates on Windows 7 Targets Takes Too Long

In your case it sounds like it could be something in your environment or it could be something with Microsoft’s update servers or connectivity to those servers.

When BP initiates a search for updates or a download/install operation, it invokes the Windows Update Agent, which is the same agent that the control panel Windows Update GUI uses, so there isn’t generally any difference in the time it takes to check through the control panel Windows Update GUI vs BP.

I’m going to send you an email so that you can send me some logs to look at.

Thanks,

Doug

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