Too many system restore points may slow down your Windows 7 startup

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If you find that your Windows 7 or Windows Server2008 R2 is rather slow to start up, these days, you may, inter alia, also want to check out the number of sytem restore points your computer has.

hotfix icon Too many system restore points may slow down your Windows 7 startup

It may happen that you may have created many system restore points manually. If this is the case, it could increase your Windows 7 startup time.

The reason for this is as follows:

Volsnap.sys is a system file found in C:\Windows\System32\drivers and also in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ too.

ReadyBoot (Not ReadyBoost) is boot acceleration technology that maintains an in-RAM cache used to service disk reads faster than a slower storage medium such as a disk drive. ReadyBoot reads (prefetches) data into the cache before it is requested. Prefetching optimizes disk access patterns by taking data locality and hard drive’s performance characteristics into account. Read requests from system processes, services and user applications are then serviced out of the ReadyBoot RAM cache.

Now during every startup, this file Volsnap.sys has to validate the snapshot of Windows, that each system restore point creates. Now if you have too many restore points, the boot plan for the ReadyBoot feature will exceed the size limit of 512 KB, and cannot be stored. This boot plan is stored in the following registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\rdyboost\Parameters\BootPlan.

In such cases, therefore, the startup I/O operations are not pre-cached resulting in a slow startup.

So if you do face a slow startup, you might also want to consider checking up your number of system restore points. To resolve this issue, you can also apply for an get HotFix368028 from KB2555428. Do so, only if you are regularly facing this problem.

Our System Restore Manager, a freeware portable utility which allows you to completely manage your Windows system restore points and customize its options, may also interest you.

Posted by on , in Category Windows with Tags ,
Anand aka HappyAndyK is an end-user Windows enthusiast, a Microsoft MVP in Windows Desktop Experience since 2007, and the Admin of TheWindowsClub.com, TheGeeksClub.com & WinVistaClub.com. Creating a System Restore Point before trying out a new software or a tweak is always recommended.

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  • TheBigOldDog

    How many is too many and how do we know when it’s having an impact? There’s got to be a way to detect if you are having this problem and a rule of thumb about how many restore points can be safely kept.

  • Juan

    I tried to download, but it says “The KB article has no public hotfixes.”

  • http://www.thewindowsclub.com/about Windows Club

    TheBigOldDog: The very same question came to my mind too. How many is too many!? Well I guess if you find your computer startup time increasing, this is something we could check up on. By experience, I have not faced any problems when I’ve had 5-10 points.

    Juan: When I last checked here, it was present them and you were expected to enter your mail ID. Today after reading your comment, I tried again and I get this: The KB article has no public hotfixes. Please contact support if you need immediate assistance. http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=support. You can see from the review date there that the article was modified, a day after being posted. Maybe that is the reason…

  • Bruce Epper

    You should keep the number of restore points relatively small no matter what, even if the system is performing well. When I do my initial build, OS installation done and completely patched as well as all of my standard software on and completely up to date, I will do a manual snapshot of the system and delete all older ones. When doing regular updates (Patch Tuesday, etc), as long as the system is not misbehaving and remains stable, I will delete unnecessary older restore points after 2 weeks or so. As a result, I rarely have more than about 4 restore points. Using this system, I have yet to encounter a situation where I need an older restore point than currently exists on the system and my boot times remain consistent throughout the lifetime of any particular build.