Amazing WSUS v3 Cleanup Wizard Time Now Into Days!

We started the cleanup wizard on our managed SBS 2003 boxes three days ago.

All of the boxes finished in anywhere from 18 hours to 36 hours later.

We have however, one box that is _still_ running its cleanup process.

Now, this is not one of our normally crusty boxes as it is under 2 years old and is running a quad core Xeon X3220 with 4GB of RAM. Its reports normally come in every morning on time.

Since starting the wizard the reports have stopped, but we left the wizard alone just in case.

It took _two full days_ for the wizard to gain and hold just one pip on the progress bar.

So, here we are three mornings later:

We now have a number of pips in the progress bar but the process is still moving quite slow.

On the other boxes, the SQL process handling the cleanup usually pins a core on the server. In this case the SQL process has barely taken any additional headroom on the CPU.

Judging by the CPU time allotment shown in the above Task Manager Processes tab new the cleanup process is running however slowly.

If we have not seen at least three or four additional pips on the progress bar we will reboot this box tonight and restart the process.

We track the progress by setting a Notepad window above the progress bar and noting the advances of the progress bar:

The WSUS V3 Cleanup Wizard may look like it is not working even when checking the SQL Process CPU usage in the Task Manager, but in this case we let it ride and things started to move after a day!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer