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Running NGen as part of installing a Microsoft Exchange patch roll up takes ~2 hours [Lakshan Fernando]

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I work in the CodeGen test team and wanted to share a recent customer experience that was related to ngen. One of our Customer Service and Support (CSS) engineers in France contacted us regarding an installation delay with the latest Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 update rollup. Apparently the patch installer was spending 2 hours generating up-to-date NGen images.

The exchange installer package issues an “ngen update” command at the very end that causes all Exchange assemblies affected by the update to be recompiled synchronously. There is a known issue with this approach that had affected some customers whose machines had been updated with a .NET Framework 2.0 patch just prior to installing the Exchange patch. The .NET Framework 2.0 patch issues an “ngen.exe update /queue” command which schedules background assembly compilation at machine idle time. Then when the synchronous NGen command is issued by the Exchange installer package, it triggers compilation of all managed assemblies that don’t have up-to-date NGen images, including the .NET Framework ones. We originally thought that this might have been the reason behind the long time taken to regenerate the NGen images on this customer’s machine too. However, that was ruled out by the CSS engineer after further investigation.

We then requested the CSS engineer for the two ngen log files created by ngen and its service found at the .Net Framework redistributable installation directory (in this case, ngen.log and ngen_service.log found at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727) and found an interesting anomaly. The ngen compilation worker might sometimes encounter an assembly that is already up-to-date, and the time taken to perform this validation is typically less than a second (the compilation worker exits as soon as it finds that the assembly already has a valid NGen image). But in this customer’s case, each of these assemblies was taking 10-14 seconds to determine that they already had a valid image (see below). These extra 10-14 seconds when multiplied across many different assemblies was resulting in a significant increase in patch install time.

08/24/2007 10:36:21 [5660]: Compiling assembly Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Common, Version=8.0.681.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35 ...

08/24/2007 10:36:33 [5660]: Assembly Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Common, Version=8.0.681.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35 is up to date.

Around the same time, one of our developers was helping out on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) issue report by another customer and asked the CSS engineer to check the “Software Restriction Policies” (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457006.aspx#EAAA) enabled on the customer’s machine. Sure enough, the delay was due to an Internet Explorer setting called “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation” (Options, Advanced, Security) that was checked on the customer’s machine, and was resulting in network requests to connect to crl.microsoft.com and look up the certificate revocation list at NGen time. The customer’s machine was behind a locked down firewall and did not have access to the internet and the reason for the 10-14 delay for each assembly. This option was unchecked in the IE setting and the install time was reduced to the expected 10 minutes from the 2-hour time. It was considered safe to uncheck this security option in IE since the machine was in a tightly controlled environment.

Short summary of what we learned from this experience: Issuing a synchronous NGen update command in the patch installer may not be the best option. It might be better to schedule an NGen update for machine idle-time using “ngen.exe update /queue”, and to (optionally) issue separate NGen install commands for perf-critical assemblies whose NGen images need to be regenerated right away.

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