New to software and have some questions

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frankr2994

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Hi all. I recently purchased NtLite to setup a win 7 32bit on a machine that was giving me trouble. Worked great integrating all the updates and driver pack. Since I now have the software I'd like to find some more uses for it. I have a win server 2016 data center license and would like to get it installed on my dell workstation. Currently have win 10 pro in the machine. First question is how can I speed up NtLite. I'm running a 6 core Xeon overclocked to 4.5ghz with 32gb ddr4 ecc memory, 1tb nvme and a 10gb ram disk. If I load everything into my nvme (boot drive) or the ram disk it doesn't seem to have a bottleneck anywhere but only uses about 10% cpu and takes forever. I've even changed all the processes to realtime priority without change. Next question is can I load and update all windows indexes on an iso? It seems I can only select one and then I have to finish after adding drivers and updates to the que.
I'm not in the IT field so I don't "need" this software but since I paid for it I may as well know how to use it.
Thanks in advance.
 
Got a chance to try it out again tonight. Shut off anything windows defender. I have no 3rd party virus software. Still very slow. Occasionally I see a 22 percent cpu usage with nothing else really going on. Looking at individual processors in task manager it doesn't look like it's using all 12 threads. It's not the end of the world. I will only occasionally use this software but this isn't the first time I've had a fast pc not do stuff faster.
 
frankr2994 said:
Got a chance to try it out again tonight. Shut off anything windows defender. I have no 3rd party virus software. Still very slow. Occasionally I see a 22 percent cpu usage with nothing else really going on. Looking at individual processors in task manager it doesn't look like it's using all 12 threads. It's not the end of the world. I will only occasionally use this software but this isn't the first time I've had a fast pc not do stuff faster.
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Hi,

depends what you do and what is considered as slow, it should be done within 10-20 minutes on a newer OS image, while in comparison due to a lot of separate updates Windows 7 image is a lot slower to work with.

Why mostly only one core is used - It's due to the nature of a Windows image being in a single image, more specifically registry within it.
Imagine integrating 2 updates, let's say one is updating a DLL and its registry entries to the v1.1 and the other to v1.2, what would it update to if the 1.1 was ran 1 milisecond before the 1.2? I hope you see the problem.
And the registry is locked after the first package session mounted it and cannot be accessed until the first update finishes.
I did make it remove files in parallel on component removal, but it has to wait for the next component's registry tasks, thus it hits 1-2 cores on removals.

That said, it can be something else is going on, feel free to upload a slow session %temp%\ntlite.log after it hits the problem.

Note that disk requirements are unimportant how much the CPU single thread is bottlenecked. Always get the fastest "gaming"/single-core focused CPU.
The Xeon, Threadripper and similar multi-threaded processors are not the best solution for these sequential tasks - they scream power for parallelism, but it is wasted as you saw.

To enable better utilization, if you need to edit more than one image, you can run NTLite on 2 images at the same time, by running second NTLite instance - just make sure not to try to load the same image from both.
Next version is upgraded in this sense, it can load 15-20 images at the same time and unload all mounted images at once, uses the CPU at 100% if having the same number of images as cores - 1.
 
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