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RegBench - Registry Benchmarker Utility

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city_zen:
Well it is not all about access speed. The Registry is loaded during system start and a smaller Registry is loading faster thus reducing system load time.
-ghacks (October 11, 2008, 02:22 AM)
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In theory, yes; in practice, not so much ...
I've just made a full backup of my registry and it shows a total size of 98 MB ( :o , I guess I should start cutting down on software evaluation  :D ). Let's say that an effective cleaner/defragger can reduce that size by 10% (unlikely). That'd be a 10 MB reduction. If an average HDD can provide 40 MB/s read speed, that translates as a 0.25 second reduction in system startup time. It could be a little more considering fewer seeks due to the defragging, but I guess that the maximum improvement could be in the order of half a second in system startup time.


Anyone times windows start times before/after?
-nontroppo (October 11, 2008, 05:55 AM)
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No, I didn't time Windows start time before and after, but I'd be surprised if it made a measurable difference.
By the way, let me mention a little known tip that improves system startup times: the undocumented "-b" switch of defrag.exe . Supposedly Windows does the same thing every three days during system idle times, but you can force it to defrag boot files by running "defrag.exe c: -b"
This is basically the same thing that BootVis does (minus the driver delay analysis, of course)
 

longrun:
I used to use registry repair and compaction utilities but concluded that they caused more problems than they solved. Now I concentrate on not mucking up the registry by using Altiris SVS.

f0dder:
Registry compaction (as in, simply re-creating the hive files) shouldn't cause problems, but registry "repair" or "cleanup"? I've stayed clear from that kind of stuff for quite some time.

Btw, I wonder if registry compaction might actually be counter-productive? If you keep the extra "fluff" around (but keep the hive files defragmented), the "fluff" can be re-used without causing the hive file to grow (and thus possibly causing file fragmentation). On the other hand, re-using the "fluff" can cause internal fragmentation. Ho humm.

mikiem:
I *think* at least portions of the registry are loaded with windows -- otherwise certain changes wouldn't require a re-boot to take effect.

[a case in point if someone's curious, ATI's CCC applet. Editing the reg entries for CCC is routine for me after a driver update in XP Pro 32 SP3, in order to get some of the Avivo controls visible... It's then nec. to restart for changes to occur -- stopping everything to do with CCC & restarting just those apps & services has no effect. Therefore I'd assume that at least portions of the registry were loaded once, on startup.]

That said, if you start up Sys Internals' reg monitoring program you'll see hundreds of constant entries - I wonder whether defragging the registry files themselves could make a major difference with all that going on? Granted not all keys are routinely accessed, but those that are it stands to reason would be the ones that would benefit the most. Kind of a catch 22 IMHO.

RE: ERUNT & NTREGOPT, the latter just rewrites the registry in one go, start to finish in separate files. Assuming it writes these files to free space without fragmentation, the individual files themselves should be faster to read than if they were spread out over your drive surface. The only time or place I've seen it make a real difference, is when there were bad entries in the registry files that re-writing took care of - either by writing them correctly or skipping them altogether, but then I like to boot into Vista to use JKDefrag on my XP drive, so unless I've been lazy they're not too badly fragmented anyways.

AFAIK reg cleaners, optimizers and such can only look for orphans -- references to other keys or files that don't exist. It can't tell you that a .DLL added by a program install, is still on your drive & referenced in the reg, long after the program's been uninstalled. And, I can tell you from experience that some software inserts so-called orphans on installation, & requires those entries to work properly.

I've taken to saving a regshot compare log with any program I'm just trying, along with doing a backup with ERUNT beforehand. In many cases I'm able to save just one or two critical keys, revert the reg to backup, then add just those keys to eliminate hundreds & sometimes thousands of useless registry alterations from the installation program. In fact, I'll often save a zipped file of the installed app with those reg keys, saving a LOT of hassle should I like the software & add it to a 2nd or 3rd PC. I've got loads of stuff installed in XP, & right now the latest ERUNT backup comes in at 47 MB. Vista OTOH with pretty much the same software comes in at just short of 90.

city_zen:
Has anyone else benchmarked their Registry before and after a Registry optimization/defragging? I'm curious to see if I'm the only one who saw almost no difference in access/read time.
Please post your results if you've done so.

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