So now what I want to do is kind of illustrate what this foreground background sink async process is
all about.
What you see here is I'm logging into my workstation and it's set in asynchronous mode.
And so essentially I'm processing group policy in the background as I'm logging in and everything is
hunky dory.
Now what I want to do is fire up the editor on the local GPO on this machine, and I'm going to go ahead
and set that policy that enables the always synchronous policy processing cycle.
And I want you to notice the difference in essentially how long it takes for me to log in.
So I'm going to go ahead and enable this policy and always wait for the network.
Get computer startup and user log on.
There we go.
And now that's enabled.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and log off of this workstation and I'm going to log
back on to it.
Let's go ahead and get back in.
And I want you to notice the difference in the log on time as I go ahead and log back on.
And you see here, now that you saw it was applying registry policy, you saw that message showing up.
And essentially what it was doing is processing policy before it let me see the desktop.
It was a subtle and not very obvious difference.
But essentially what was happening there is policy processing for the user.
My user account, the administrator account was completing before it.
Let me see the desktop.
And it was a slightly longer log on time.
And if you had dug into the logs on group policy processing, which I'm going to talk about in a future
module, you would have seen that the same group policies were applying.
But they were applying at different times.
One was applying while I was getting the desktop presented to me and the other was applying before I
got the desktop applied to me.
So this is kind of a fundamental difference in synchronous versus asynchronous, and I typically recommend
to folks not to turn on the always on synchronous processing because it can slow up your desktop experience.
You only saw one GPL applying to my user account or my computer account, but in larger environments
where you might have five, ten, 15, 20 GPOs applying to a particular user or computer, then this
delay in getting to your log on screen or getting to your desktop can be significant.