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XP SP2 Can Slow Down Business Apps

Posted by timothy on from the tradeoffs-are-everywhere dept.

An anonymous reader submits "Mobile PC magazine installed XP SP2 on a bunch of notebooks and benchmarked them, finding that SP2 caused a 9-percent performance reduction in business productivity apps. While a couple of notebooks performed better, the majority took a 3- to 22-percent performance hit." For now, the story is just at the top of the Mobile PC website, but they promise more details in an upcoming issue.

6 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Another benchmark test by Adam9 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is another article where they ran different benchmarks on SP2 and SP1. The office productivity test was the one with the biggest difference. The article puts the blame on the new firewall.

    They should compare a PC with SP2 and one with SP1 with a third party firewall.

  2. Coral Cache Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Cached link in case it gets Slashdotted.

  3. Not a code change.. a compiler flag change.. by bmajik · · Score: 5, Informative

    specifically, the /GS flag to the VC++ compiler.

    The compiler was modified to support automatic stack overflow checking (i.e. canaries). Server 2003 was compiled with this (and as a result, MANY things that are shared-code problems resulting in exploits on other NT based OSes are either ineffective or DoS attacks on Server 2003).

    The idea is that /GS compiled binaries will cause the OS to terminate the app rather then letting code execute. The source code generally doesn't need changes.

    So, its a defense in depth tactic. Ideally, there'd be no BO's in code. But there are. Terminating the program with an explanation as to why is better than letting people run code on your box. :)

    --
    My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
  4. Hello morons, turn off DEP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=875 352&product=windowsxpsp2

    Note the /NoExecute=AlwaysOff option in the article.

    Well known cause for much of the slow down some people find with SP2. Of course, this opens you up to morphic/purposefully overwritten code exploits, but such is life.

    1. Re:Hello morons, turn off DEP by robhancock · · Score: 3, Informative

      No-execute protection still does something on CPUs not supporting hardware NX, it's just not quite as effective.

  5. Re:Buffer checks by cowbutt · · Score: 3, Informative
    Immunix for one. Alternatively, taking a slightly different path towards pro-active security measures, Red Hat has recently included exec-shield (as seen previously in Fedora Core 1 onwards) in RHEL3 update 3. FC2 includes SELinux, so that'll probably turn up in RHEL eventually, too.

    --