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XP Service Pack Slows Programs
AEton writes "Vnunet and others are reporting that Windows XP's Service Pack 1 has introduced a flaw into the operating system. Changes to memory handling code result in programs which often allocate memory (which is many of them) can take up to ten times longer than normal to start. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem in Q815411, and while a patch is available by request from Microsoft Product Services, it will not be widely released until Service Pack 2."
...In the meantime, Microsoft suggests you refrain from running programs which use memory. Thank you for your patience.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
It looks like the pirates who weren't allowed to upgrade to SP1 have gotten the last laugh. Piracy does pay! Thanks MS, for pointing this out.
This is really just more anti-Microsoft Slashdot FUD. After all, this only affects programs that allocate memory.
Programmers can easily work around this bug by returning right after printf("Hello World") finishes.
Now I know why they call them service packs rather than upgrades. Apparently Microsoft doesn't even trust themselves.
Avoid Service Pack 1, or better yet, avoid Windows.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Both Openoffice and Mozilla have slowed down quite alot with the latest security updates from Microsoft.
When I open openoffice is just sits there doing nothing for like 20 seconds and then launched. No excess cpu overhead or anything. It just stalls and then runs. Its just annoying and I wonder if its a conspiracy theory.
Has anyone else noticed this?
http://saveie6.com/
More good work from MS's 'does it compile?' quality assurance program
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
you use XP. Serves you right for piracy.
Windows XP's Service Pack 1 has introduced a flaw into the operating system.
Drat, just when we all thought windows had achieved perfection. Back to the Visio board...
Each component in Windows is so intertwined together that when one thing needs to be fixed, the a few other pieces breaks, which must be fixed, therefore more pieces break and it will get to a point when all pieces break and it is better off to run NT4, as Microsoft stopped breaking it.
Please direct all bug reports to
Here: http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=9815&categor y=main
Here's a link to the file:
x p/ Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe
http://home.t-online.de/home/520092137223-0001/
And please, before somebody gets started with a flame war, WinHeap is not open source (although there is a source code license available), but it is free for non-profit use.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
This patch, along with the fact that MS won't be releasing a patch for that recent gaping hole in NT4, reminds me of a scene...
(Read along in a mock British-imitating-French accent, ala the castle scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail)
Microsoft Engineer: We've got a problem here, chaps!
MS Users (All, Amongst Selves): Well, how about a patch then?
Microsoft Engineer: Uh, we've already got one, you see.
MS User 1: Are you sure he's got one?
MS User 2: He says they've already got one!
Microsoft Engineer: Oh, yes. It's very nice-a.
MS Engineers: [chuckling]
MS Users: Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look?
MS Engineer: Of course not! You are clueless types-a!
MS Users: If you will not show us the patch, we shall switch all our systems to Linux!
MS Engineer: You don't frighten us, clueless pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Linux King, you and all your silly open source k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
MS User 1: What a strange person.
MS User 2: Now look here, my good man--
MS Engineer: I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
MS Users: Is there someone else up there we could talk to?
MS Engineer: No. Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a! [sniff]
(With aplogies to Monty Python)
Script here.
What the hell did they have to go and touch that for? Was is broken?
Yeah, so the new Microsoft standard malloc() and takes 10 times as long to load as the old version. But with this increase in time, the customer can be sure that the memory allocations are being done more securly, and in a way that's good for them.
Also as a bonus, no more pesky free()'s. When that memory gets allocated, it STAYS allocated untill you (have to) reboot your system.
Huh?
And I answer my own question... :)
http://www.warp2search.net/article.php?sid=11377
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
SecureCRT takes forever to start up.
So I suppose SP1 is to XP as beer is to me: a tool to slow your reaction time. Too bad it doesn't make XP more attractive...
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe
Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
This explains why my Acrobat reader is crawling. I installed the fix and now all is back to normal.
Jamey Kirby
Here's another thought...Wait until you (or someone trustworthy) has actual evidence of something like that, before spouting off?
Linux is cool, I have a dual-boot set up myself, but- I cannot reliably run 99% of the Windows games and many other programs i've spent hundreds of dollars on under Linux. Hence, I and many others like me can't just switch over to an all-Linux box, just because the Man at Microsoft might be slipping nasty stuff in that there's no evidence of.
Why bother asking Microsoft for the patch? Here you go. :)
Just because im a nice guy...
http://www.paricom.com/matt/xphotfix/
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
This particular fix requires calling Technical support to get. It's even in the Slashdot article!
Historically speaking this makes it an upgrade
Sure, it has some side effects, but don't all fixes?
It's ok, it just refuses to install SP1, it doesn't invalidate your product key.
Advanced users are users too!
Probably job security. They have to have people that patch the patches to the those other patches that were ment to fix the O/S.
Whoa, whoa whoa. Hold it right there. Alpha patches? For WinXP?
.44 magnum shells and dry cleaning. I refuse to pay one red cent towards dragging you into the street by the hair, shooting you and then pissing in the 6 craters I will have just created in your body.
You , sir, are one of two things:
1.- You are an evil cracker who is tempting people into downloading your latest Trojan Badger^WHorse code so you can r007 them and be a 1337 h4x0r. Except they'd actually have to be for NT4 to run at all, you fucking lamer.
2. - You are a Microsoft engineer who has XP running on the Alpha processor. Which means Microsoft still supports the Alpha internaly, and Compaq needn't of killed it. I could have had an EV8!!!
In either case, you can expect your next of kin to recieve a very large bill for beer,
HAND.
Soko
(Still mourning the Alpha)
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
What you can do is call 1-800-936-4900 which is Microsoft's Hotfix Line.. Tell them the Q article and they will pull it up and send a link in your email.
But I have already done this for you.. And I didn't forget you alpha users!
http://www.paricom.com/matt/xphotfix
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
I don't know about anyone else but I noticed a fairly noticable slowdown in XP when I installed SP1. I've since uninstalled SP1.
Personally I prefer speed over security.
Where the Music Matters
I work in a local computer repair shop, and 30% or so of the computers we load SP1 on stop booting properly. No safe mode, no VGA mode, just a wipe and reload. They boot then restart as soon as they should be getting to the desktop, caught in a eternal loop. Unless it is specifically requested by the user, I definatly don't load it. Thats just the major of many other problems we have come across with SP1.
adventure-today.com
But due to the Service Pack update, IE took ten times longer to launch! ;-D
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I haven't on my machines and test machines at home and office with various softwares. Are there any known programs or games that does show this?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Memory leaks are often caused when using streaming applications because they tend to use a lot of bandwidth, causing your internet "pipe" to have what's known to us programmers as an "overflow condition". This problem is often exacerbated by having too many open ports. On Linux and BSD you can generally fix memory leaks by applying a tarball with the "patch" utility to the affected server.
Memory leaks were very common in older systems that used 'bubble memory' and lots of pointers.
Other things you can try are entering the BIOS and turning off the "memory hole". This is unnecessary for everything but OS/2 anyway. If you do need to keep the memory hole, you can try using the "finger" utility to plug the hole. This method is popular with Netherlands programmers.
HTH.
It is plain that Microsoft's internal testing is insufficient. I don't really fault them for this -- it's simply impossible to have enough configurations, testcases, and procedures to cover more than a small percentage of the actual ways the product is used.
IMO, Microsoft would benefit by issuing public release candidates for new OS versions and patches. It would greatly reduce the impact of problems with patches and new releases.
-Thomas
Every new release of windows runs slower than the one before. Looks to me like MS is trying to stay ahead of the curve.
Tetris rules.
Not to be an ass or anything, but XP doesn't run on alphas. If you take a careful look at the patch file, you'll see ia64 in the file name. 2 completely different architectures.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
I knew it!! Where else is that money going? I never see any...
I never did quite trust printf(), a little on the seedy side it always seemed to me. How can it just keep taking arguments? That's just not natural.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For too long have tail-recursive supporters been laughed at and ignored while people used fancy stacks that grew without bounds!
No longer! Now, arise my tail-recursive brethren and let a new day of shallow-stack programming commence!!
Wait - stack growth is not the same as memory allocation? My bad. Back, I say, supporters of the One Recursion! The time is not yet right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well... Actually, it's not /. FUD.
/.
/. some bad news about Microsoft turns out to be true. =)
1.
It's being reported in other places than
I first read about it in the newspaper...
2.
It's being reported on Microsofts own website.
So maybe it's microsoft FUD? =)
3.
The problem actually exists. (Thus is not FUD)
It doesn't appear on *every* XP computer with SP1, but some actually load programs at 1/10 the speed that they did without SP1.
Even on
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Well, Bill said 640K of memory is enough for most people, so I guess M$ it taking that as a design goal and ooptimizing their OS for things that don't need more RAM than that
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
As a programmer, I have yet to run into this bug. I am using Windows XP SP1 with all patches from Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer applied. My game engine contains a few routines that rapidly allocate and deallocate memory for linked lists. There might be more than 400 allocation and deallocations every second from the time the engine starts. I have used GlobalAlloc (or the synonym LocalAlloc), HeapAlloc, VirtualAlloc, and CoTaskMemAlloc. Not one has proven to be slow at all, however, I settled on HeapAlloc since it seemed to be the most flexible. But, this may change if my plug-in system needs direct access to allocated memory (which only CoTaskMemAlloc provides). Does anyone know how to reproduce the bug in code?
If it was the major flaw the slashbots would want you to think it is, you wouldnt have heard about it first on slashdot. (Did you hear about Code Red, Nimda, Slammer, etc on slashdot first?)
As an aside, here's another nifty coding flaw I found recently:
I guess I posted from the future! (cue scary music)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Holy crap... I love the fact that every post that's been modded to 4 or 5 seems to be written by someone who doesn't use Windows.
FYI: It's not a big deal. I've been using SP1 for months, and haven't noticed anything. Obviously, so have a whole lot of other people.
It's nothing to get so worked up about.
(Posted AC because this will be flamebait to some people).
SP1 for XP was supposed to address the DHCP problem that Microsoft has had with XP Home. Being a tech guy for a college, I can tell you that the DHCP issue was never corrected and people had to end up upgrading to XP Pro or upgrade to 2000 (yes, XP Home to 2000 is an upgrade, IMHO).
"This food is problematic."
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
I haven't seen any slowdown personally...
I run:
Internet Explorer
Photoshop 6.0
Dreamweaver (yes, I am that lazy)
SimpleMu
Winamp
Windows Media Player
Office
Slowdown really bothers me too, so I'd expect if it was really noticable, I would have noticed. I suspect this may be more of a "benchmark thing" than anything else.
That means apps will be loading 10ms instead
of 1ms on my brand new p4 with stripe raid ?
*going to shoot myself in the head*
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
IN5T4-LLM3T-0CR4P-UPURW-1ND0Z
Works as per SP1 specifications.
Doesn`t the whole OS slow programs? I mean, since whe are running an OS, we know it will slow down our apps. Is the counterpart to run only an app, no network, and so on, but Why cant be developed critical apps for the PC (or other cheap platforms) with no OS? (I mean, apps that boot themselves) It would make OS crashes less critical for that critical apps and make response speed (since no scheduler, context switches, etc...) increased. It would be a pain to work in one of those apps from scratch, but they would not rely in nothing but hardware. I remember playing a game for the PC (80286 era) that selfbooted from a 1.44 Mb Disk....
------- The last Sig. got fired.
I have Apache 2.0 and MySQL 4.0 configured as services. Then upon logon, Mozilla 1.3 loads itself in memory. I often had to wait up to one full minute after system boot and user logon, for the networking subsystem to get started !!! This meant no Internet access until one minute after logon - not acceptable. With the hotfix applied, boot is faster (as in pre-SP1) and there was a sizeable difference in programs load time.
This means me and my friend will be able to play Descent 1 without the originally gentle bobbing of the ship sped up to a nauseating earthquake speed! Dust off that copy of Descent and try it for yourself. I dare you to try and play for 15 minutes without getting a nauseating headache!
:-D
moox. for a new generation.
... folks with Macs are yawning and getting on with their lives. Macintosh: more than a computer, it's a way of life.
be an ultimate recycler - buy an old used car every year
Yeah yeah, I gots me one of them thar Itanic workstations at work .... I bought it to run HP-UX, and well, it bites.
...
:)
Ready for prime-time my ass.
I'll stick with my SunBlade & PA-RISC workstation, thanks
Now off to get a nice shiny AlphaStation
Where do you want to go eventually?
You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?
:)
You are kidding right? Of course I know how to get into safe mode. If you'd READ my post you would understand that the machine will not *allow* safe mode to be entered when this problem occurs. I hope this has restored your faith in the human race, as your comment has diminished mine.
adventure-today.com
Considering the relatively large amount of people running a pirated version of WinXP, and haven't installed service pack 1, i'd say the problem is rather contained.
Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
I've just installed the hotfix and it has made quite a difference on my 433MHz w/ 256MB RAM laptop. Trillian and my wireless network monitor both start up noticably faster, and Opera starts faster as well. I would say I notice a speedup of a few seconds for the network and maybe 1-2 seconds for Trillian, maybe 4 for Opera.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
If you ever had an application ported from UNIX to NT that wasn't a memory hog under UNIX but slowly ate its way through virtual memory on NT, this is most likely why.
Microsoft sneakily added the _heapmin() function to combine contiugous small free'd blocks into big chunks of memory.
Unfortunately, free(), malloc()'s happy buddy, had been combining free blocks on each call to free() since the dawn of the C programming language.
My guess is Microsoft got better performance on benchmarks by essentially not freeing memory!
If you look at K&R "The C Programming Language", Kernighan & Ritchie implement malloc and free Hey but don't take my word for it. Intel has warned you about this for a while, [p.61 of 101].
But Mircosoft "fixed" it in MSVC 4.0 and up.
In a related move, Microsoft has quietly added to the Windows SDK that the color red, formerly 622 - 760nm, shall be redefined with the values 455 - 492nm (formerly known as blue). Programs from other platforms should add a call to the _PutOnRoseColoredGlasses() function to avoid compatibility problems.