Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files

Bruce Schneier has said that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. With Vista, Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job of making premium content files not copyable. Now a few readers have tipped us to a new wrinkle: Vista also makes it very, very slow to copy, rename, or delete ordinary files. Here is a Microsoft TechNet thread on the problem. The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely. And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.

Comments

Confirmed!

[yoyhed]

I can confirm this. Copying a 10MB file from one directory to another on the same partition, on a fast 7200rpm 16mb cache SATA 1.5gb/s hard drive, can take 5-10 seconds, whereas it's instant on XP for me.

Re:Confirmed!

[Gr8Apes]

But how do you miss a fundamental core process? That's like hmm, should we see if IE7 connects to the internet? Naah, no need, of course it does.

I've noticed issues with Explorer deleting/copying/moving files (since the IE switchover). This is in XP btw, not Vista, so I'm not so sure that it's due to rebuilding anything. It's bad enough that I drop to the command line when I have a particularly large directory tree of files to delete or copy (we're talking a few 10s of thousands of files here in a heavily treed directory structure). Takes almost no time from the command line. Whatever explorer does adds eons (in computing time) to the process.

Isn't the big "secret" of Vista that they actually didn't rebuild so much of it, but took the 2003 server codebase to start from and yet again slapped "pretty" on it?

Insightful?!

[jimicus]

How can this be insightful? This is a reworking of an old troll, which originally went like this:


I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

I've had this issue

[The Mysterious X]

But, after a week or 2, it suddenly cleared up.

I never did track down the cause of it, but disabling volume shadow copy and indexing did mitigate the problem a little.

Once it cleared up, re-enabling them did not cause any problems.

My simple results

[DnemoniX]

I run Vista Business Edition on an AMD64 X2 4200 with 2 Gigs of ram. Performance wise I haven't had any real issues with this exception. I read several posts, flamers and fan boys aside here are my results. I used a folder containing 51 files for a grand total of 142 megs. When I copied this folder from one hard drive to another on my box (both are WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives) and viewing the "More Details" on the copy dialog Vista reported a speed of 22Mb/sec. When I copied the same folder from my desktop to one of my network shares the dialog reported a top speed of 441kb/sec and said it would finish in 7 minutes. When I ftp the folder to one of my servers it averaged out to 7,997.3kb/sec and took 24.63 seconds. Seems to me something is a bit off...

Re:I just tried

[Barny]

For those unwilling to read the forums (or who block all MS sites at their router), the problem relates to Vista making thumbnails of files, and trying to continue making them even when you have told it to delete a file, its not a transfer speed problem, and can be VERY easily stop gapped by disabling thumbnail views in the folder view settings :)

The thing I personally have a problem with in vista is folder browsing, I have not spent money on a good raid array (and made sure it had vista drivers) and lots of HDD just to have a half second pause when I double click ANY folder.