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XP SP2 Can Slow Down Business Apps
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.
You can't install a really big bunch of fixes and expect Windows to run faster!
It has been always this way
I've seen some drag on my system since putting SP2 on, but it's really a double-edged sword.
However, in my experience it's harder now for sites to push ActiveX controls and executables to your PC now, unless you do a bit of tweaking or visit a deliberately malicious site.
Considering the system drag that occurs when the average user installs spyware inadvertently, I'd say the SP2 drag ought to be cancelled out for the time being, as it's a bit harder for spyware to propogate under it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't this have been done right in the beginning itself?
If I were writing any commercial grade code, especially stuff that I know that people would take advantage of, I would sure as hell make sure that I had all my buffer checks in place.
I've heard so much about the programming practices at Microsoft and what not - and yet, ironically, these things keep cropping up so damn bloody often while some operating systems coded by a bunch of loosely connected hackers are way more robust and stable.
Hmm, makes one wonder.
(Heh, funnily OpenBSD site says - Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years! - I guess it does say a lot).
I do not understand, I would have thought that despite all the shit that MS gets for writing bad code, they would make sure that their code is largely buffer checked. Now, when you have to release stuff from outside to patch up for those, you would obviously be wasting a lot more cycles than if you had done so in the beginning, and well.
Sheesh. They do not do a good job of making software and cause you inconvenience, then they release something to make up for it, and that causes you even more inconvenience.
Hah.
One of the changes in SP2 was a rate limiting / queing behavior for the number of current sockets in the SYN/opening state.
In other words, suppose you have an app which tries to open 30 tcp sockets simultaneously. Some of them will get delayed by the OS.
This is to try and thwart the speed of worms or DDoS programs - which very often try and create a zillion tcp connections that never end up connecting.
Unfortuneately, it has the side effect of hurting some p2p apps (like bittorrent) and some web browsing configurations...especially if you've changed the registry value that sets the # of simultaneous socket connections IE will make to the same site. The default is like 3 or 4, but if you upped it to say, 20, and then hit a site that had 30 images all on the same server... it is likely that some of your http requests will get queued until other connect() attempts complete the handshake.
Does it suck that this is affecting some browser and other scenarios ? Yes. The topic is under discussion internally at microsoft.
The _intent_ was to try and slow down the spread of worms/ddos attacks in the event a machine got compromised....a good goal to have i think anyone would agree..
The implementation, however, does have disadvantages
If you decide to try SP2 again, anytime the connecting socket limit is reached, an very specific/obvious event will be logged in the eventlog. If you are experiencing slower network interactive speeds, try looking in the logs to see if you're hitting it.
One mitigation, by the way, is to have a proxy (i.e. squid) on another machine.. that way your handshakes from IE resolve _Very_ fast and your sockets rapidly go from handshake to connected...thus reducing the likelihood of you hitting the queing behavior.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
99 buffer checks don't do you any good if one buffer is missing a check, and that one gets exploited.
That's what their compiler modifications are intended to help with, and from my experience, they help. I do agree that it should have been done sooner, though.
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Uh hmm, your argument is flawed for the simple reason that just because Linux has buggy code, does not excuse Microsoft from writing good code.
And comparing Dennis Ritchie's code with today's code is again flawed - hell, why, given my today's knowledge of Physics and Mathematics that I learn by my twelfth grade, I would have been the most intelligent man alive 400 years ago.
You do not compare with what Dennis did or might have done, you make a reality check with how things are today - there is a fair section of crackers who want to exploit systems, and if you are in the business of writing commercial code, you'd better be darned good at making sure your code is good because customers are *paying* you for it.
I have another issue with MS - they concentrate more on releasing things early than checking the code full before releasing. If this were an isolated issue, I would not have a problem - it is not. And MS has had so many years in the market, so many top-notch programmers AND the resources. If you want to compare, look at OpenBSD - that's an example of OpenSource code done right - with one remote exploit in 8 years.
Linux is still in it's infancy, and for all that it's capable of it, it's quite unfair to compare it with the products of a 20 year old behemoth. If you ask me, Linux is doing a fantastic job of being a top notch enterprise systems in such a short time, when compared to Microsoft. And very few of the people behind it actually make any money of it. Does that not say a lot?
I was not trying to flame MS for their past actions - however Microsoft started out with a fairly clean codebase for both Win2k and WinXP. Given that, it seems bad that such vulnerabilities keep coming up.
I do agree that both Win2k and WinXP are a lot more stable than their predecessors. However, you would think that when you are doing something the second time, you would double-check to make sure that you do not make the same mistakes as you did the first time.
I just feel that this is not happening - and any number of factors could be contributing to it (market, economics, manpower, complexity what not) - but that does not mean you do not take the pains to not do it well. I'm sure Microsoft's trying to take as much care as they can to ensure that this does not happen.
However, despite that, these still seem to be happening. Which is what I find quite baffling - there seems to be a fundamental flaw somewhere in there, and that needs to be taken care of. Which is what I mentioned in my initial posting, too.
You are right in saying that MS comes from the same Cowboy C Coder Culture (CCCC, ha!), however MS has had a significant amount of time to grow out of it. If twenty five years later they are still doing the same mistakes they did back then (maybe fewer in number, but equally dangerous), there is something wrong.
Fundamentally, yes, you are right in saying that complexity brings such mistakes. However, that's not an excuse to use it as a crutch to release buggy software.