A large number of driver updates showing up in WSUS

Hello, my name is Joe Tindale and I am a Support Escalation Engineer with the WSUS team.

As some of you may know we recently released some driver updates that resulted in an extra ~12,000 updates flowing to your WSUS servers.  At the root of this problem our drivers are published in a one-to-one fashion, meaning a single driver may apply to 100 unique hardware ID’s however we must publish that driver update 100 times, one for each unique hardware ID.  The good news is we are currently working on the infrastructure so that we can release the drivers in a one-to-many fashion.  The bad news is this fix won’t be addressed until a later version. (https://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2008/07/17/so-many-drivers.aspx)

With all those updates on a server it can negatively impact performance.  Each time a client connects to WSUS for a detection cycle all the deployable updates need to be presented to the client.  An extra ~12,000 updates being presented to each client creates quite a load on the server.  Also, whenever you open the WSUS console and try to view large unfiltered amounts of updates, such as “Any Except Declined” the query may timeout before the page is rendered.  All because of the load those extra driver updates create.

To get around this I wrote a tool that would go in and decline ALL driver updates thus helping the two performance issues I mentioned above.  Simply copy the tool to some directory on the WSUS server and run it from a command line.  In addition to doing this I recommend you deselect the “Drivers” classification from the Products and Classifications applet of the options page (unless you really need to deploy driver updates).

Keep in mind that this is not an official Microsoft tool and thus Microsoft makes no warranties or guarantee's, nor does Microsoft support the use of this tool in any way.  Use it at your own risk.

Get the WSUS Driver Declining Tool here.

Joe Tindale | Support Escalation Engineer