Slow/Not Updating Progress Status

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  • #14036
    stanleyj42
    Participant

    Starting about a year ago when deploying windows patches the progress status reports differently or not at all for every single machine. We have a mix of about 40 windows 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2022 windows servers running across 8 ESX 7 Cisco Host on 10gb network. There is of course other servers on these host but these are just the ones we use batch patch for. None of the host are more than 50% consumed with resources.

    Over year ago when we would deploy you would see the standard Searching…, Copy of the patches, Caching, installing (#/#) and then completion status followed by the reboot message. Now when we deploy patches all machines get hung at a different progress message and never update. The only way i know they are ready is when the reboot status appears which for some is pretty quick and then others may take hours before that status comes back. Even though when i check the event logs of the machine i can see the patches have been installed.

    This is issue is never the same machine. Even just doing a single machine may sometimes give a correct 100% install message like i expect and then sometimes never gets past searching… I know there are other factors that could be involved like our network which we dont manage but these machines do not experience any issues with day to use. Only seems to be deploying with batch patch from what i can tell.

    Just wanted to see if anyone else else might have experienced this or be able to offer somethign for me take a look at. Thanks

    #14037
    stanleyj42
    Participant

    I would like to mention that I can do all other functions with BP without issues. Copy files, deploy regedits, check services, reboot etc… And they report back immediately. It only seems to be with windows patching and it wasn’t always like this.

    #14039
    doug
    Moderator

    First, unfortunately starting a few years ago we started frequently seeing the progress information delivered by Microsoft for various updates just not being accurate anymore. This seems to just be a matter of poor quality control at Microsoft that we sadly have no control over.

    Second, it’s possible that you are encountering some kind of performance issue in BatchPatch, though based on what you’ve described as primarily a progress bar issue, the issue is most likely just number one mentioned above (unless it’s actually a combination of issues). However, with regard to BP performance… The one major factor that currently can affect performance in BP is when the volume of data in the BP grid has grown quite large over time. At a certain threshold, the grid’s performance can have issues. (We’re working on trying to improve this). If your grid size on disk is in the multiple megabytes vicinity (or higher), or if you simply have a large volume of data in the ‘All Messages’ column that grows each month because you save your grids each month and then just reopen them the next month and continue appending to them, then it’s possible that you are encountering a performance issue. The simplest way to rule out any performance-related issue is by just starting a brand new grid from scratch. If the issue still manifests, then you can be sure it’s related to the progress data from Microsoft (which we unfortunately have no control over). To keep your grids lean in the future, you can use ‘Actions > Clear column contents’. Or you can start a brand new grid from scratch and save it as a .bpt template file (‘File > Generate template file’ or save it normally as a .bps file and then manually rename it from .bps to .bpt). When you launch a .bpt template file in BatchPatch, it will always force you to save a copy of that grid instead of saving over the template. So if you launch the .bpt file at the beginning of your maintenance, then at the end when you go to save, it will make you save the grid as a brand new file so that the .bpt file is not modified at all. Then next month you can just launch the original .bpt again to start with a brand new grid again.

    #14040
    stanleyj42
    Participant

    Thank you for he information. Our grids are fairly small so it could be the issue with Microsoft but i will certainly give clearing out the grid data and see if that helps. Because we do typically save every time we close it.

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