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Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files

Posted by kdawson on from the how-many-million? dept.

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.

20 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Confirmed! by yoyhed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
    1. Re:Confirmed! by yoyhed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This just in! An extremely common and necessary file operation takes about 10 times longer to do in Vista on the exact same hardware! Trust me, it's _really_ annoying. Oh, and this is Slashdot, of course there will be an article about every little thing ;-)

      --
      WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
    2. Re:Confirmed! by drooling-dog · · Score: 5, Funny

      Moving/copying a lot of large files is very suspicious behavior. The compliant and well-behaved user who leaves things where they are supposed to be should only rarely have to do that. Perhaps Microsoft is slowing down the process to give you time to reflect on the error of your ways (or maybe to think about switching to a different OS)...

    3. Re:Confirmed! by Gr8Apes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      With something so basic and fundamental, yes, it will be reported on /. It indicates MS completely blew QA on Vista, which isn't surprising since they were going to ship in Jan come hell or high water. Another delay was absolutely not acceptable, as Vista delays have already made them a laughing stock among some, and more importantly was shaking confidence in others.

      I think we will see that rushing out an incomplete and untested product is a sure way remove confidence. Evidently MS hasn't learned from their "only use odd-numbered service packs" mantra that used to exist among many of us. Why was that? Because the odd numbered SPs fixed the issues of the even numbered SPs, including the initial release.

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      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    4. Re:Confirmed! by Gr8Apes · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    5. Re:Confirmed! by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      oh for heavens sake. In QA it is impossible to catch everything.

      Well QA departments usually maintains a serie of tests and run them on various architectures and measure the time taken by each test. Trying to copy/erase/rename files seems like a basic operation you don't want regression on, so it is probably part of a test. The fact that such a thing wasn't caught on a flag product just amaze me.

      Agreed, it should not *too greatly* affect anyone. But you have to admit that when you have bought Vista for a fistful of dollars, probably bought a recent computer to make it work, you have the right to be annoyed when a basic operation is slower than on an older machine, with an older OS.

      In fact, on linux, I wouldn't care much and would agree with the "oops, sorry here is a fix" because I didn't pay for that, because the developer wasn't paid to write the soft and wasn't forced to release a fix, so yeah, there is a bias and it has some good justifications.

      Also I don't know what kind of uses you have with your computer, but copying or moving 10+ MB files happen all the time. If you are a gamer, a creator, a film/music down... consumer, hell, even if you are a MS Office user, 10Mb is insanely easy to reach.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
    6. Re:Confirmed! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'll bet they've added some more fricking metadata...They spent all that work trying to come up with a database filesystem...You know they didn't just toss all of that code. Also, they have all that "search your hard drive" functionality built in to compete with spotlight, so it has to index and categorize files, etc, etc, so your searches seem quick and responsive.

      Just a bunch of bloat. Move the bits first, then go back and do the rest of that stuff during system slack time, but Windows does everything on the fly...Or on the crawl, as it were.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  2. Why only a Hotfix and no patch? by jkrise · · Score: 5, Funny

    For very very basic functionality?

    What is Vista doing? Factoring large primes in 640KB RAM?

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    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  3. WTF Register quote? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I realize "The Register" is the "National Enquirer" of IT, but what the heck does this quote in TFA mean: "it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM"
    I've used Windows 2000 with only 256M of RAM and it's quite speedy...I've run a remote desktop session over a 56kbps link and although noticable, it's pretty speedy. (and yes, I've copied big files over that link)

    How does mixing speed (bps) and RAM (M) work anyway? It's sorta like saying "I've driven my car 50kph with a cat,ferret, and dog in the back seat but when the seat covers are blue it seems really slow"

    TDz.

  4. Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (an Intel Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs 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 ancient Mac running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad 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 Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista PC that has run faster than its Mac OSX counterpart, despite the Vista PC's same chip architecture. My 286/12 with 2 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.4ghz mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

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

  5. It is feature I invented by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, They stole my stuff. My code takes very long time to do trivial tasks. That is my idea. They stole my idea!

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  6. Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses by kevinadi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?

    MS is pretty much mistaken when they thought people will blindly go for Vista when all they could offer as an improvement from XP was transparent windows. Bleh.

  7. Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?

    Shiny!!

  8. Insightful?! by jimicus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. How is this a surprise? by Critical_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a Vista beta tester, I've personally reported the file copying bug at least half a dozen times. That, along with the crap UAC prompts, seems to be the least of my troubles. When do people start harping on about Vista's extremely poor video and sound-playback performance? On older systems, the move to VMR for all video playback severely decreases playback performance. For example, on a Dell M60 latop with a Centrino 2.0Ghz (single-core) CPU, 2 gigs of ram, 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive, and a nVidia Quadro 700 Go w/ 128meg video card I can playback raw HDTV without a hiccup. In Vista, the same playback drops nearly half the frames regardless of the various decoding codecs used. Disabling Aero leaves the problem in the same situation. Disabling sound (AC'97 sound) lets a few less frames to be dropped. This is not an isolated problem but exists on many machines.

    This problem is a lot bigger than just file operations. I really have to wonder why anyone is going to bother with Vista for anything expect the lastest/fastest consumer/gamer machines. I'm sticking to XP and my next laptop will be an Apple Mac Book Pro. I'll vote with my dollars, thanks.

  10. I've had this issue by The+Mysterious+X · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. My simple results by DnemoniX · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  12. Re:Interesting... by david_g17 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Why is Slashdot so slow to highlight glaring defects in Vista?

    Actually, slashdot reported on this months ago; however, since the slashdot server is running on vista, it took this long to get inserted into the database.

  13. I just tried by iceperson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't seem to reproduce your problem. Copying a 10MB file is instant, extracting a 10MB zip across drives takes about 4 seconds. This is on a machine that scores a 1 on the "Windows Experience Index".

    1. Re:I just tried by Barny · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      ...
      /me sighs