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Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?
An anonymous reader writes "Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking."
I wouldn't be surprised if they find Vista is spending all its time making sure those precious audio tracks aren't being illegally copied during playback...damn those thieving music lovers...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
This is clearly an attempt by Microsoft to encourage people to buy more music to listen to while waiting to download the the upgrade to Vista SP1. I have pictures of a meeting between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at a Carl's Jr. Steve handed an envelope under the table to Bill. Who knew?!?! Now it all makes sense why iTunes was promoting a track last week called "The Biggest EULA of Her Life" by Randy Newman.
Playing Vista slows music performance.
WTF?
How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?
PCI resource scheduler issue? I'd love to see Disk I/O on a fast RAID Vs sound usage...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
There's probably a very good chance this is related to Vista's heavy handed DRM software. It's been reported that Vista does constant checking to see if you (gasp!) might be playing a file it thinks you don't have rights to. I could certainly believe that this kind of overkill DRM might effect network performance.
It's like the Top 40 of suck.
Okay, it's a lot of little things but those add up for many users and businesses. I'm sure MSFT will get all the little niggling things fixed...eventually. The main issue I see is that MSFT really needed a home run with Vista and what they fielded wasn't much of an improvement even when it's working properly. And certainly not worth the cost differential.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput.
Wow! I bet streaming audio must suck!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
What if you play the song Speed of sound by coldplay??? What will Vista do then?
Sorry, could not resist.
I pick a different OS. Any OS, as long as it's not Vista. If I used Vista, I certainly wouldn't anymore after this; it's rare that I don't have some music playing when I'm using my computer. How the hell does this even happen, anyway? Seriously, how do you manage to fuck up the OS so much that simple audio playback pretty much breaks an entirely unrelated (or so one would hope) part of it?
Could be DRM like others said, but I wonder if it is the marvelous prioritized I/O biting you in the butt? Is there a way for you to check the spacing between packets? I wonder if the network packet gets sent, while waiting for a reply the process context switches, then because the interactive bit is at a higher priority it takes longer to get a time slice to run the process again. The video playback might be causing more context switches ifself, because of the bit rate is higher, so greater chance you'll get a cache miss and switch as the I/O falls through to the harddrive, and the network would get the CPU back, making the download + video faster than download + music.
Has someone tried to packet sniff this thing to see what it is doing? Would vista hide that too?
[alk]
I choose Linux & or Windows 2000.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Interesting... I thought I was going nuts the other day... I was Transcoding Video from my (powerfull) Vista PC to my XBox360. I noticed that if I was using Media Player to do anything on the PC, that it was slowed my network performance down quite a bit. I thought at first it was because of the transcoder working hard to buffer the other video, but realized the two cores weren't even being used that much, and memory was fine.
For those of you thinking this is a hardware or a driver issue, RTFA. In the posts in this thread, many many different hardware combinations were tried, including one guy who used USB audio hardware. Sorry, but it ain't a hardware or driver issue...it's almost certainly a flaw or a bug in Vista.
Could be DRM, maybe, but that's just speculation. One guy said he stripped the audio from a video and played just the video, so I'm not certain it's DRM, either.
My blog
I have been a long time Microsoft user (notice I didn't say supporter, simply user) I've given OSX and various flavours of Linux a shot, but for whatever reason I decide to stay with Windows every time...no particular reason, I just like the interface the best...maybe it's cause I was raised on it, I dunno. Been using windows regularly since Windows 3.1.
Now. That being said. Ever since I saw screens of "longhorn" and the list of proposed features, I was excited. I knew a lot of it wouldn't be in the retail release, but still...Microsoft had me more excited about an operating system than I had been since the first press releases of Windows 95. It wasn't just Aero (which frankly doesn't really sway me one way or the other), it was primarily the little tweaks and things that they were talking about. Vista looked like it was going to be mind blowing.
And then it was released. Every week, some new story surfaces about something not working right, or something being broken, or some kind of fucked compatability...as it stands, I don't think Vista will ever be on my computer. XP works fantastic for me (although I do have an Ubuntu box hooked up to my computer for movie and TV show playback), and Vista seems to case more problems than it solves.
Grats, MS. Unless you pull something out of your asses soon, you are going to lose more and more users such as myself. And we are important insofar as your desktop buisness goes, because we KNOW you are full of shit and we still don't care.
We are starting to care, though.
Living With a Nerd
that vista is rapidly becoming the OS that nobody wants. Not consumers, nor business is adopting it at the rate MS was hoping and these types of things don't help their cause.
With any luck, maybe, just maybe MS might fix some of these problems with their service packs. If not, vista has all the earmarks of becoming the new ME.
Obviously you are trying to stream your music over the tubes, you dirty pirate!
We'll throttle you back to give your pirate customers choppy playback. Take that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Could this be audio fingerprinting - where the audio is examined for a signature derived from the audio samples themselves and then compared against a database of tracks? this system has been mooted as a "perfect DRM" vehicle as is does not matter what audio compression, or file format is used as the audio itself is used to generate a fingerprint license checking.
p rinting
I can find a reference for video fingerprinting which quite explains things more eloquently then me : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_finger
I could imagine this would come at quite a hit in terms of processor bandwidth and hence slowing down the whole system.
Of course I would expect this would be visible in Task Manager, I would be tempted to check myself except that I do not (and do not intend to) use Vista.
Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and any sheep will just believe it without further inverstigation....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I actually have a 10% faster internet connection! All I need to do is to upgrade to Linux.
Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.
The forum goers seem to think the problem lays with something called MMCSS that boosts audio priority when files are being played back. This looks to be a buggy scheduler rather than nefarious DRM checks mucking up performance. The problem hasn't been pinned down by a long shot, but the scheduler makes the most sense.
bullshit.
there are any number of operating systems, even some by Micorosft, that do not have this problem.
I'm sick of the going in asumption being "well, you have to use x". No. You don't. There are a cacophany of choices everyone makes. And it drives me batshit when people assume that buying Microsoft anything is not a choice.
Every time your mom or Joe down the street or some multinational company buys Microsoft's wares - its a choice. Whether or not its a good choice is strictly up to the situation.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Wasn't there a story on Slashdot a while back about how multimedia apps in Vista would take priority over others whether you wanted to or not? This summary (you'll actually have to RTFA since it's not in the summary, sorry ... or just look through some of the comments) might be the one I'm looking for...
R.Mo
- Bugs like this get noticed sooner and are easier to fix since they are fresh.
- QA cycles are more focused.
- Customer feedback helps drive the product to something the customers actually want to use.
- Customers can have an easier time adapting to smaller changes.
Please note that OS X has proven that a faster iterative development model can work for a desktop operating system. They're releasing every year or so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X#Mac_OS_X_10Big-bang software releases, ala Vista taking years to develop, are destined for bugs and customer rejection like this. If you, as a software developer are stuck in a project with a release date longer than a year away, please take the time to set your project manager straight.
Actually streaming audio might be a good test. One suggestion in that topic is that the cause is that vista is raising the priority of threads related to streaming. Stream audio over tcp/ip might raise the priority of the tcp/ip stack and the problem might be cornered this way.
But as always, MS is silent.
"Working as intended."
I run Mandriva at home and my wi-fi would grind to a halt if I played any kind of audio. As soon as I stopped the audio, the network came back. I found a couple of reports online from people that appeared to have the same problem, but never a solution.
I had to change out the motherboard for an unrelated reason, and the problem went away. It was a completely different chipset on the new motherboard, so I figure there was a problem with the drivers for the old one. I think it was C-Media audio.
He quotes one user,
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and some fanboys will refuse to believe it with one anecdotal test....
I have an old computer at home (7 years old with the same motherboard). It runs XP and I hate Web 2.0 on it for exactly the reason you're stating with Vista. Whenever sound plays, the computer lags, often freezing for a few moments before playing the sound. It's noticeable and a pain in the ass, though I don't know if this is the same as the Vista problem.
Even the US Government said no to Vista. And that is going to stay as long as Vista "requires" the capacity to dial home to the mothership. So, take that for whatever you like. I know that as long as that is the case, I flatly refuse to even consider Vista for any of my machines.
He was labeled a zealot and largely ignored. An educated guess says there is a connection--you cannot load an I/O chain with a complex architecture that constantly sniffs the entire chain for malfeasance without some performance impact. That said, I believe it is likely any impact will be significantly reduced over time since this is Vista DRM 1.0 and so it is the first version of the code. I have no doubt Microsoft knows this is a problem and that poor performance vis a vis XP could limit the adoption of their new platform. One would think that an operating system under development for years by an "innovative" company would have been vetted of this kind of plodding code. But then one remembers this is a monopolist that heretofore has had little competitive challenge to its desktop dominance and therefore little incentive to either produce efficient elegant designs or face market share erosion to competitors. I think Microsoft honestly thinks the world will take Vista no matter what it is and are relishing the thought of being able to pull that off. And I see no sign so far they have anything to worry about either despite the faux outrage at the growing list of flaws in Vista.
Windows 3.11! Boost your network performance with our TRULY multitasking system!
Music Benchmarks:
Windows 3.11_ **********
Windows Vista ***
And it comes with Reversi, too!
Microsoft's customers, the music industry, have to make sure that the criminals who play music over the internet are very limited in the amount of intellectual property they are able to steal.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If you don't like it, there are plenty of alternatives out there.
Deleted
Anyone else remember MultiMac, a beta MultiFinder-like program from Apple circa 1985. It ran on the "Fat Mac" under System 2.0. You could use the modem, printer, and applications at the same time but when you did any one thing, background printing - and everything else in the background - slowed way down.
Like non-NT-based versions of Windows, it too crashed several times a day.
Far more likely that it is recording the title as well as a hash of the item. Otherwise, you would be able to detect the network being used. This way, when your computer gets inspected by RIAA, they have a partial or even possible a FULL record of what you have been doing. Far easier to prosecute.
Trying playing any music backwards on Vista. If you listen real hard, you can hear "Gates is the devil incarnate. Balmer is dead".
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
people are used to windows, in big ways and little ways. for your average slashdot nerd, going between linux and os x and windows is not a big deal. for other people, it is. all of us here make fun of the complete computer moron: "how do you click a mouse?" "where's the any button?" but the truth is the vast majority of users are technically uninclined (not that much, but my point is, more in that direction than in the technical direction)
now we could use your tack, and throw up your hands in disgust. or use another tack, and make fun of them. or yell at them. or stare at them in cold silence. or make sarcastic remarks about them. etc.
either way, they're going to stay with windows. you can have any emotional reaction you want. doesn't get your average joe to switch from windows
my personal point of view is to emulate the windows gui in every single way, down to every little detail. then you'd get switchers i think
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can I float an idea past the Slashdot editors:
If the only source for a story is one which would not qualify as a Reliable Source per Wikipedia guidelines, reconsider whether you have a story.
Yes, that includes stories based on a thread on a hardware forum.
I'm not asking for Slashdot to be held to journalistic standards (multiple source and/or independant investigative reporting). But Slashdot is supposed to be a news site, not a rumour mill. Is a single reliable source for unverified speculation like this too much to ask?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Deleted
I am surprised no slashdotter mentionned this already... But could it be caused by the fact that, in Vista, the audio drivers are implemented in userspace ? My guess is that an actively used audio driver in userspace causes roughly 5,000 to 10,000 extra context switches per second. I didn't RTFA but this kind of CPU overhead would definitely be big enough to cause a visible reduction in network throughput when trying to max out a GbE link... Either because of the CPU time spent dealing with the context switches, or the extra latency it can introduce if some locks have to be held too long by the Vista kernels on some data structures concurrently used by the audio and network layer. Keep in mind that GbE network cards generate roughly 10,000 to 50,000 interrupts/sec when transferring at speeds approaching 1 Gbit/s, so a low latency in processing these IRQ is also critical.
Proving yet again why it's a good thing the linux kernel is written in C and NOT C++. Anyone who sells you on the advantages of OOP while ignoring the fact that all that abstraction comes at a price, is doing you no favors.
Maybe Apple can use this in an ad somewhere:
Vista = Car made for Homer
Apple BSD / Linux kernel = VW Jetta - smaller more economical and doesn't need 100% CPU cycles to save a file to disk.
One more reason to switch to Linux kernel.
Second Version Syndrome:
In the old days:
Version 1 is the unproven version.
Version 2 is the bug-fix version.
Version 3 is the new features version.
Now it's:
x.0 is the new-feature version
Be wary of any software release promising new features.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
and:
I guess this problem doesn't apply to people with 1MBps "broadband". What's your network speed?
The question then is does it effect other IO?
/. running out of words for the catchpas?
Effect? No, the word is affect. Ah'-fekt. AFFECT!!! Got it? Repeat after me :
AAAAAAHHHFFFFFEEEEEEECCCCCTTTT!
-------------
My catchpa is clitoris. Is
this doesn't bother me really...
when i run windows at home, it is in a virtual machine, and the network cable gets yanked out the back of the box.
windows is someone else's problem at work, and the hassles of sql and applescript are enough for me. i refuse to let windows waste any more of my time.
you might think this is off-topic, but is it really? if you have a critical server, and it must not be hacked, you partition and make the core os disk read-only.
if your time is valuable and you are not paid to know windows, put a shroud on the beast, keep it off network whenever possible. buy mac os x or linux, buy an xbox, get on with life.
How many YEARS now has the goal for software been to simply, "Make it work," and we STILL haven't been happy.
But Vista is something absolutely new under the sun. Vista is the first time that a major portion of the goal has been to, "Make it NOT work, some of the time." That's right, non-functionality is a key goal of Vista, because that's really what DRM is. Under the "wrong circumstances," don't work, or at least degrade operation. (Who knows, maybe "degrade operation" is an even tougher goal than "don't work.")
So here we have it, conflicting goals:
- Work! Do what the user wants you to do.
- Don't work! The user is naughty even asking you to do that!
and the hardest...
- Figure out when to work, and when to not work.
A much more subtle set of requirements than normal software. An important facet is that it blurs the notion of "who's in charge?"
- With OSS, the user/programmer is in charge.
- With Windows up to XP, the user is in charge, though Microsoft has a few deeply-buried probably-static exceptions.
- With Vista...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Typical "high-UID" catchphrase. Not our fault you were off playing with Windows 98 when there were still low UIDs to be had.
i covered that in my comment above
emotinal reactions don't convince anyone. the iterative changes between office and 98/me/xp/vista are still orders of magnitude less than picking up os x
you don't have to like my observation. however, you have to admit that completely emulating the look and feel of the windows os is a better tack than being passive aggressive at them to switch to an utterly foreign gui
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Iron Maiden's mpr DRM free of course
Just out of curiosity, what happens when you play music that has DRM? I don't have Vista so I can't test it out for myself, but most speculation has lent that it's likely the DRM that causes these issues, so perhaps it doesn't occur on non-DRM music?
10Mb half duplex?
or
Using two computers?
Consumers are very forgiving and patient when it comes to Microsoft. That's consumers of all kinds not just Ma and Pa Sixpack.
Eventually, most users will be forced to switch to Vista. Sure, they'll lose a few to the consumers who have knowledgeable IT friends and family recommending other OS's. The way forward is to provide no feedback to Microsoft on their products. (ex. not sending those stupid crash reports) Other than evangelizing other OS's, it is a sure-fire way for Microsoft to develop another bad product.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
I "-" in firehose for a variety of reasons, including reliable-source-or-lack-thereof.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I bought a new laptop with Vista installed; I took my newly purchased DVD and put it in my laptop, to check the screen (as I was informed touchscreen are awful for movies), anyway, it didn't work: Somewhere between the DVD, the decoder, the player and *insert BS here* it refused to play. So I put VLC player on it and it worked perfectly first time.
Why was I prevented from playing my newly purchased DVD on my newly purchased laptop? Sarcasm aside, I have now made the decision to go to Linux entirely, not even dual boot; I no longer care about those couple-of-things(tm) that you can only do with Windows, I'll live without, work around or solve the problem/s myself, on my machine, with my software and all the things I want to do.
I noticed with my home network that if I have a shortcut to a share on another computer on my desktop, and open a file on the desktop, that much network activity is created even though I am simply, say, looking at a JPEG. This doesn't make much sense to me and the time delay is significant. I would use Linux instead of just play with it if I could get decent video drivers to work.
The problem is likely to go away once you install a Linux distribution, be Fedora, SuSE or other.
I just checked this on my Vista Ultimate system. I played a MP3 (I even pulled up 2 other players at the same time to make sure) and my network still stayed up at 20 to 30% like normal. Closing the players did not affect the performance at all.
This might be a specific set of drivers or something but it doesn't seem to be a plain Vista issue... at least not for me.
It's obvious what this is! It's so that when they release Windows 9 they can say "but hey, the audio subsystem sucked in Vista, 9's is sooooo much better!"
Just bought a Toshiba laptop that was new, on clearance, for $359 this month. Of course, it came with Vista, Home Basic. First thing I did was research replacement drivers for the audio/network/video chipsets, blanked the HD, then installed a slipstreamed Windows XP Pro. So now I have a perfectly legit license for a POS OS I never wanted (took me a day just to verify for myself why everyone hates Vista). The laptop, for the record, runs at almost 1/3 to 1/2 faster than it did under Vista.
Anyhoo, my question is, does Microsoft offer license exchanges or refunds? Before you laugh, I recall sometime or another, that a PC manufacturer offered refunds on PCs shipped with XP, when the end user wanted to build a Linux box, or an XP box with a preexisting license. Hopefully I can at least try this with Toshiba, I could use the beer money.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It's strange. I hear a lot in the press about businesses and governments holding off on Vista, waiting for SP1, whatever. I hear a lot of techie folks, both on-line and in real life, saying they won't touch it after all the negative PR.
And then I see figures from Microsoft that show adoption progressing at similar rates to their previous major OS releases.
I am forced to ask whether Vista really sucks as much as "they say" and "they" aren't installing it, or whether I'm just hearing views from too many biased sources.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ironically, it works the other way with my car:
As it gets older and slower, I get more audio equipment for it. . . .
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
The solutions people have mentioned so far are very possible (user space audio drivers, PCI bus conflicts, scheduling).
Another possibility is the media timers in the microsoft API. I don't know about Vista, but under XP, the system timers by default are not very accurate, because higher accuracy timers taking more processing time to update. However, this isn't really acceptable for audio/video and gaming, so they have a special Multimedia mode you can set that will make them update at a higher frequency.
Unfortunately... this is a system wide setting. Which means if their network application is doing a lot of system time lookups for timestamps or something, it is incurring the extra penalty as well.
We noticed this at some point when a particular simulation application ran correctly - only when windows media player was also running. WMP enables this multimedia mode, affecting every other application using timers on the system.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I've read the newsgroup thread and I am sort of surprised that this got to Slashdot.
If I had a guess, I would think that the audio access to the disk is causing problems with their file copy access. I don't see any perfmon stats captured, nor do any of the newsgroup participants indicate, what threads are running, with how many IO, by using Process Explorer or Task Manager. This could be DRM, but no one has come up with any clear explanation.
I know MS brings fear and loathing to most Slashdotters, but until someone, who has a decent understanding of Vista, announces a DRM issue, and explains the problem clearly, this sort of thing should be ignored for the FUD it is.
machinator omnis sine licentia
mfpmp.exe?
Are you saying a motherfucking pimp is supervising the audio and crippling outside communication attempts? And killing the mfpmp makes everything run free at high speed?
I'd say ganstarap culture has spread too far and may soon be deemed uncool.
This is total speculation, as I didn't even read the article. But is it possible MS did it on purpose to allocate the missing bandwidth for programs like Windows Media player when it does streaming media? Doing this would prevent newbies from complaining about poor streaming abilities. Is there a way to test this idea? One possible way would be playing streaming content (with windows media player) that uses an amount of network bandwidth >= the missing amount and then use the rest of the bandwidth for other things such as file transfers and see if the overall throughput without sound equals the throughput of windows media player + file transfers. Just an idea.
Were they using software based sound systems (ie - integrated into the motherboard), or were they using dedicated hardware?
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
When M$ won't let anyone have XP on new machines anymore? M$ is ensuring adoption by businesses, which in turn will trickle to the consumer.
Perhaps they're sending your music up the network pipe for comparison and analysis as you play?
</theory>
I want to know how exactly network performance is supposed to be inferior to XP to begin with?
My Vista Business install has shown itself to be much superior in networking to my old XP install on the same hardware.
Vista is just overall a hugely bad idea -- the idea being the Hollywood now owns your PC.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
must... preview...
steps should be as follows:
1) Not running as Admin.
2) Installing Commodo.
3) Installing Firefox.
If QOS is turned off, do you still see a loss of 10%? Sounds like the simplest answer. I've been playing with IPTables and privatization of packets. This is very cool for giving the ssh interactive traffic priority over Windows network chatter, even better when something (READ: Windows) is broken across the WAN.
I'm not asking for Slashdot to be held to journalistic standards (multiple source and/or independant investigative reporting).
Those who modded you up must not have read the article, which is par for the course here I guess. But that forum thread is actually an excellent one, showing that many Vista user have witnessed this problem, and it detailed the many steps they took to try to fix it, unsuccessfully.
You must be from Microsoft, and this simple truth of people's experiences with Vista hurts. Well tough. Vista is bug-ridden like Windows was until XP, and by abandoning XP for a new O/S, MS has several years of bug-fixing ahead of it before Vista reaches XP standards.
Instead of wasting time trying to dismiss people's troubles with Vista, why don't you do something more productive, like fixing the code?
I am not a number.
uh, when you get together your minimal technical abilities for using the computer police, get back to me
however, i think that you'll find that in reality, being computer competent or computer incompetent doesn't mean a damn thing as to your right to sit in front of a computer
think about that, and change your point of view. because currently, your point of view is invalid. invalid in the sense that it is supposed to make a difference in actual computer usgae and os purchase. you do want to affect those things right? you want your opiions to be valid on those questions, right? currently, your opinion has no ability to affect reality. thus, your opinions are invalid on the questions you seem to care about
learn some ugly truths, change your opinion, get back to us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To use the Windows media player even on XP will result in a slowdown of the system (probably some DRM checking).
What I do to get around my system slowing down when I simply want to listen to a cd is to use mplay32.exe instead of Windows Media Player.
I remember using an Amiga @ 25Mhz and playing CDs without issue, even thru the Amiga sound channels...
So the question is...... Why does windows suck the life out of a 2.8 Ghz system?
This is why you don't purchase software predicated on a closed OS that can be doing any number of things wrong (not moral and not ethical, and possibly not legal).
How does this affect other computers on the network? If, say, you work for a large business and you are playing back music does this affect the performance of other users on the net?
With Open Source software you'd know precisely what the cause is in an extremely short period of time. There'd be no excuse for someone not pinpointing it in a matter of hours. Because this is closed source we can't ever know except in very high level terms meant to reduce backlash from something like this.
If this is Microsoft using DRM against your own music library then shame on them. It is none of their business what you do on your computer, period. If some crime is being committed it is up to the law enforcement agencies to investigate and turn it over for prosecution once they collect enough info. If it is Microsoft or the RIAA involved in such a thing we need to ensure that the average person knows what's happening so we can get this monkey business stopped. I'm sure there'll be some class action against the likes of the RIAA and Microsoft it this turns out to be an issue of them stealing peeks at what you are doing within the confines of your own home.
GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS--THE COMPUTER YOU ARE USING IS AN EXTENSION OF YOUR OWN HOME AND TO SPY ON YOU IS AGAINST THE LAW AND ARE IMMORAL AND UNETHICAL.
I don't know why you guys can't seem to get your minds around that. You would no more allow Microsoft to enter your home (or the police for that matter) without a warrant searching for specific things. This computer is an extension of what you are day in and day out. These *companies* have no rights to enter your domain. A man is the king of his castle. For the sake of your family, friends, loved ones do not allow these companies to take one step closer. Force them to back off. Bring this stuff down to real world terms. Entering your computer is the same thing as entering your home.
Bottom line, free and open software is the only thing that will, in the end, protect you and your privacy as well as your legal rights. The good thing is that Open Source Software is high quality and very effective at doing the same things that closed source software does. There are enough product in Open Source to do those same tasks in the same way even creating the same document types that the closed source software does. Now with Open Document Format being an ISO standard we have much better chance at real interchangeability between different products.
So, why stay with closed source software designed to spy on you and violate your privacy and the sanctity of your homes?
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
And wine :P
Hand me down my silly-scope, Maw, the danged computer's a-runnin' slow agin...
Just junk food for thought...
a lobbying firm.
Microsoft has been known to choose the worst algorithms to implement things (see US DoJ vs. MS AntiTrust trial), so it's not surprising that Microsoft's first attempt at a user-mode sound driver implementation causes performance problems. It's also likely linked to the DRM that Microsoft had to put in to appease the various studios.
Wouldn't be surprised if a similar link was found with video playback as the video drivers are also user-mode in Vista too, and are also DRM encumbered.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Except that the Windows Audio service depends on MMCSS, so if you try to disable the Multimedia Class Scheduler, you can't listen to any music at all.
For the record, I just tested this bug on Vista Small Business and found the same result. If I load WMP, I can still utilize ~35% of the network, but as soon as I start a song, or have a song paused (or even stopped but still loaded) it drops down to 8-10% every time.
The Windows Audio service depends on MMCSS, so if you try to disable the Multimedia Class Scheduler, you can't listen to any music at all. (I just tried this myself, that's how I know)
For the record, I just tested this bug on Vista Small Business and found the same result. If I load WMP, I can still utilize ~35% of the network, but as soon as I start a song, or have a song paused (or even stopped but still loaded) it drops down to 8-10% every time.
Media player helps HLDS (half-life dedicated server) TREMENDOUSLY to run at higher than like a 50 framerate (server not client) with media player running it goes up to like 500-1000.
It does this by enabling a high quality timer, and maybe playing sound does something similar.
Lets see, I can play an mp3 while transferring a file at 120 mega bytes per second over an iSCSI interface hooked up to a pair of 28 disk fiber filers. I can transfer to a SATA RAID from a SATA RAID at 60 mega bytes a second. Playing an MP3 in media player or a movie, even a 1080P movie, causes no effect at all on the network speed during the copy (a 8gb ISO file). I'm pretty sure 1000 mega bits per second is equal to 120 mega bytes a second. If I can use my iSCSI NAS at 100% and play a 1080P video at the same time then I'm guessing just about anything would work without the described behavior.
I would assume spending 5 minutes running media player and performance monitor together to see if the story is true wouldn't be too much trouble. That might might make slashdot editors talk to a dirty vista OS user, let's just assume if the news is negative then the news must be true.
a tiny bit of humor goes a long way, well done ;-)
and of course your point is accurate: it's not rocket science, it isn't THAT different. but all i'm saying is it is different ENOUGH for the average computard.
and if the computards are so beholden to the windows gui experience, why can't somebody somewhere just copy the damn gui in exacting detail? wouldn't that go a lot farther than say berating them for being stupid and not switching?
is the point to win the war on conversion to non-microsoft os'es? or is the point to feel superior?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Part of the reason for posting things like this is to see if there is a genuine issue or if it's just a biased set of anecdotes. Those with knowledge of the area can relay their own experiences and offer expertise relevant to determining exactly this. In this way slashdot can do it's own bit of "investigative journalism".
If slashdot could only publish what was already published by "reliable sources", then it would be even more derivative than it already is. Those who want to read things help up to wikipedia standards should probably stick to reading wikipedia.
Digital restrictions suck performance but still don't work. M$ knows this but plunges on anyway. The result is that Vista is a failure by every measure and 2007 may be the Year of Linux that we have all been waiting for. Vista is a great example of everything that's wrong with non free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The following two links prove that sounds and networking are broken in Ubuntu?
o rkingb rowse_thread/thread/5a7ef25066f9280d/d9b2340020e84 4af?lnk=st
http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+sound+not+w
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.user/
Well, clearly not, but it's ok - I added a question mark to the end of the above statement, so I'm not spreading FUD ok?
Vista might have issues and quirks, but it basically works. Bad news travels faster than good, etc.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I'm running Vista Home Premium, but with User Account Control turned off (it's the only way to fly). I just ran the following experiment:
// pings until told to stop
ping www.google.com -t
Without any music playing, ping times were 9 to 10 ms at 32 bytes of data
With music playing, ping times were the same, with times jumping up to 11ms every so often.
This could have something to do with UAC.
I think it's a superior OS to XP. I think the design is more secure and stable, though I consider XP to be rather stable as well.
The new look and feel can be turned off, in which case it certainly isn't slower. I'd consider it faster then XP to be honest.
I like its smart use of dead cycles and unused RAM for indexing and precaching. I like the new explorer options and much improved searching.
All in all it's certainly a step forward.
I don't know if I'd say it's worth upgrading over XP for most people that are running XP just fine now. But I certainly would suggest Vista over XP if one were going to be buying one OS or the other.
I have Vista running on a three year old Toshiba laptop. I just tried this and it did not happen. I started a network transfer of a 700mb file and opened an mp3 in winamp. There was no slowdown of the transfer. The transfer actually got faster as it went while the mp3 was playing. This is probably a certain soundcard/chipset or driver issue. I installed a beta performance patch that seemed to fix a few issues and may have fixed this before i encountered it.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
my Pentium 1 - 133Mhz CPU could play MP3s. The tiny 'couple mW' CPU in the ipod shuffle can play MP3s. You expect me to believe that a modern computer is having CPU contention issues over the processing power to play a MP3?
This is a non free software issue. XP does not have this issue on the same hardware. This leaves Vista's obnoxious digital restrictions as the operative change, and we can safely blame that for this problem and many other media issues. Non free software devolves to this in time and people finally seem to be rejecting it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here are some screenshots showing the performance hit in action. Wow! So much for Vista performance!
It has been a few days i didn't see any anti-vista article... :)
I was wondering if I got to the wrong site,
but hey, now i recognise it
Perhaps Vista has the opposite problem and does not handle shared interrupts properly, so when the sound and ethernet interrupts happen the processing gets screwed up.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What would people do when they are buying new computers dizzy about the marketing hype?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Windows Theme Music !
I remember watching a streaming video a while back of the new Vista kernel developers (perhaps even linked by this very site) talking about what, and how much had changed in the new Vista kernel.
They specifically mentioned that they designed such a feature into the kernel so that when you play multimedia clips for example, more priority is given to the video subsystem. So it wouldn't surprise me if the throttling is actually intentionally built in and not just "extra overhead" as it tries to do DRM or whatever on top of the existing tasks.
This prioritzation based on content type and hardware device is a differentiation that was not made with the slower hardware and previous OS versions - would sometimes result in choppy audio/video as bus/resource hogging ensued on older systems.
Mac Fanboi kickin' it, old skool on the cuttin' edge.
lol!!
this is a feature, and a damn fine one if you ask me.
anything that prevent windows users (aka, Bill's serfs) from connecting to my internet is a GOOD thing
right?
This could be related to the SVCHOST.EXE stuff if MS is doing it the same in Vista as they were in XP. A friend had some malware that would flood his network with so many outgoing packets that his sound would go away. I finally figured out that the same SVCHOST process that controls the networking stuff also handled the sound, and when the networking would eat up to 95% system usage, there was no more processing power left to handle the sound. Cleaned up the malware and the sound was back to normal.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I bought vista (ultimate) for a new PC, but got so annoyed with it that I bought a new XP pro licence after that. now why would I do that if I were just making up random shit and/or had never tried Vista?
Does the music-slows-down-the-network effect also happen while playing games? That would be very bad for the Vista online gaming "experience"
For the record, I use Vista on one of my PCs at home but until now haven't installed any games on it. I use it as a music server not a player.
I'm so tired of hearing all this crap about Windows Vista and the steps backwards it's taking. What a joke! It's just one thing after another... "oh, you mean you want to play music on your new computer AND use the Internet?" It really is a step backwards from XP. What is Microsoft thinking? Oh yeah, we need more money.
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
So as long as lusers are listening to music, all of the various botnet zombies and spyware-riddled PCs won't be spewing as much crap degrading everyone else's performance, right? If Only.
I use terms like "M$" and "Windoze" because I believe that they're clever, and Netcraft confirms that cleverness scores people mod points around here, although it doesn't always work.
As always, I ignore people who reply to me to point out I am either lying or just flapping uselessly in the wind. I find reason and logic to be inconvenient in my quest to convince the world that they must switch to free software or suffer the consequences. I consider myself an "evangelist" and I believe people should put up with me because I Am Right.
But, I urge you to just use your head when reading my posts. Most of what I say can safely be discarded as sophomoric fluff designed to bring out the worse in people. Make your own choices about technology and be smart.
Thanks.
Vista sucks.
Yawn...We know, dudes, we know.
Every single Microsoft OS ever released sucked more than the last one (allowing for bug fixes and completely rewritten stuff like moving from 16-bit to 32-bit). More complexity, more insecurity, less scalability, more unreliability (arguably Windows 2000 and XP were more reliable than Windows 98 - wow, big frickin' deal! They still suck on a day to day basis.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You're really getting 100% bandwidth... it's just that the worm Microsoft installed with Vista is busy sending your hard drive contents to Fort Meade, Maryland while you're toking to your bootleg MP3 rips of Pink Floyd. (Disclaimer: I own stocks in large tinfoil producers.)
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
It uses the microphone to detect echo from your head. This starts with the first approximation that your head is symmetrical, smooth, and round. If the echo shows any sign of left/rigth asymmetry, it brings in the next layer of feedback control by simulating a rotated ovoid head, and progressively brings in more features such as topological variations (nose, eyes, ears, open mouth). It is continually trying various time delays to make sure it isn't confused by emenations from your own mouth, nose, or ears (tintinabulation).
Once it determines the maximum quality feedback parameters, it backs off various parameters to try to reduce the computational footprint. It keeps a record of these adjustments and periodically adds them back in temporarily to make sure the basic parameters are still valid. If any of these trials show the need, it will restart the complete feedback search cycle.
Where does the network figure in all this, you ask? Simple. All that I have described so far is reactive feedback. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or more usefully, predicting how much feedback control is necessary can pay bigger dividends -- more bang for the buck, so to speak -- than reactive analysis. If it can tell what you are doing from packet analysis, it has a better chance of predicting your head position. It looks at HTML pages and tries to guess what content is shown, in order to know if it is likely to affect your head position, and then tries to guess where that content will show on the screen, in order to predict where your head will be.
Coupled with mouse and keyboard controls, this can lead to amazing sound quality from the piss-poor speakers found on most laptops, even simulating 5.1 speaker systems with just the two speakers found on most computers.
Now you know.
Infuriate left and right
I'm wondering what effect this would have on online games since that is one situation where you are almost certainly going to be using audio and network simultaneously. Has anyone done a comparison of XP vs Vista with respect to game latency/ping?
when someone using Vista plays a very large audio file (maybe in WAV format) over a network connection, maybe even from another Vista machine share? If Vista is all about prioritising the multimedia on a machine but in doing so it actually causes too much lag and jitters playback: catch 22? Out of the 80 odd PCs I have administration over none are Vista and I'm damn proud of it!
You know what I prefer Windows 2000 compared to 98 and XP compared to 2000 hear a pattern? Sure it'll take a while but Vista will become............... And you /.'s know it.
I use XP Pro and Win2K for all of my machines with the exception of the wife's HP laptop running XP Home. I have used everything from TRS-DOS (and TRS-Xenix) to NeXTStep to RedHat Linux to dorking around with the AIX 6 Beta. I own an original IBM XT box, a NeXT Cube (with the NeXT Dimension board), various Macs, PCs, and a ton of parts for all.
Basically, after 30 years in IT, I'm an agnostic as far as OS and even hardware. I use XP Pro because it works "OK", not because I have any love for it. It's the standard at work, so I use it at home. Our VPN clients are modified to require a specific firewall, so it's easier to deal with XP than rigging up something on a Mac or Linux box.
Plus, I'm a cheap bastard, and my current game machine is an AMD Athlon 3500, 2GB of RAM, and an old ATI Radeon 9800 Pro mated to a 22 inch 16:10 LCD at 1680 x 1050. I play FarCry, COD2, Tribes 1 and 2, Alien Arena, Quake 3, etc. with decent framerates. Upgrading to Vista would likely kill the box as it stands right now. When SP2 for Vista comes out, I'll be ready to build out a new game PC, and I'll probably do a clean install and leave my "old" XP Pro machine for a backup.
I will note that the latest versions of iTunes will momentarily cripple my XP box, especially when ripping or burning CDs. This was not the case with pre-v7.x iTunes, so I'm not thrilled about that. My network throughput doesn't suffer, however. Since I do forensic network analysis for a living, I'm real aware of what's happening on the wire (and in the air on my wireless segments), so I would be very perturbed with the described behavior in Vista.
So, I'll pony up the bucks for Vista someday...just not anytime soon!
I am my own gestalt.
What's news here?
Windows XP.
Ok, the first person that gets the bright idea to actually look at the packets and the timing of the packets on the network gets a cookie. Even though I suspect that the context switching might be the issue, I would like to see someone checking what goes on on the network. Differences between acknowledge packets being sent for instance.
Am I the only person still using windows 2000? I still think it's the most reliable OS that ms has ever put out (maybe on par win win2003 server) with the latest service pack it's much more usable and light on resources than any other non-unix based os; the others (xp, vista) just seem like 2000 with more colors and drm.
Owners of certain wireless network cards have been complaining since Vista's release that transferring data over the network causes the audio to stutter. I myself have this problem, and there is no movement toward new drivers for a fix.
It looks like notebook manufacturers released one set of drivers after Vista's release, and don't intend to provide any updates.
What was with all that? You're not supposed to take twitter seriously. Everyone around here just smiles and nods whenever he posts something.
Like I said before, I don't have to be clever to get my job done. I just have to be annoying as all hell and disrupt conversations.
And let me guess... you are in a World of Warcraft raiding guild, you enjoy ganking noobies and killing vendors and quest-givers?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Excuse me, its an AMD Athlon XP 2400. Stupid typo/user.
I can remember back to the day that we all took out a piece of paper that had our Slot numbers and the IRQ's, ports & memory block addresses written down in pencil to make sure that we didn't have any other card colliding with another cards memory address or trying to share an IRQ, and then checking that against the fabled "PC Ref" Blue Book to make sure that everything was cool.
I'm not sure if people are still aware that specific PCI slots *do* share IRQs, and that even though Windows has had "successful" IRQ sharing since Win98 that it's not always dead-on. We all know that there were huge (if not massive) changes in how Windows Vista manages resources; hence, maybe Vista has actually shown the world that IRQ assignments and which slots that they're assigned to still DOES matter. Since I only build my own systems, I'm still making sure that certain cards are not in slots that share IRQs - that's just a habbit of mine. I would like to hope that companies like HP, Dell, etc. still pay attention to those things and just don't slap cards or on-motherboard functions into any old position in the IRQ space, thinking "Oh, we don't have to care about that anymore and haven't had to care about it since the days of Win98"
If this is the case, wouldn't that just suck massively for users of "full-boat" motherboards, with video & networking features on them and have them hardwired for the same IRQ? I've seen the same companies listed above (and many more) do some pretty stupid things in the past, and I wouldn't be suprised if this scenario was prety close to home.
--ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
I don't know why all of you guys seem to hate Vista so much. It seems blabbering against Vista is one of your main activities (along with Bush, MAFIAA and so on of course). But, man, Vista is just great : it gives us a good laugh almost every day recently ! What other OS could do that ? Hmmm ?
My
Sounds exactly what happened when I attempted to play any music at all on a 486 with 2 MB under Windows 3.0. Could it be that Vista is just a nicer looking version of Windows 3.0???
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
So your net effect is probably marginally effective for MS. Did you get fired or something, or why the confession here?
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
I can have an MP3 playing which is being streamed wirelessly over the network from another machine, running its visualizer and still get full network speed from a browser or other net service. The bottleneck is my DSL connection.
This is on an iBook G3 running OS X 10.4 - an old slow machine with a 600MHz CPU. And still it doesn't break a sweat. Now tell me again why anyone on this planet should even bother with Vista?
I tried it on a 100Mbit Network and I get high network usage with no effect of playing music or not. I'm going to see if I can get 1 Gbit going...
Fanboy!!!!!
I see the effect on 1Gbit.
Peter Gutmann wrote an article that I believe explains what is happening here. It can be found at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html
HTH
You fail it.
My post count is actually Over 9000
Why not just spend 1 interrupt to transfer the whole 8 to 20meg of data to ram in the ONE GO, then play the mp3 from ram.
Surely the 20meg is cheaper than 50000 switches/second. Since many lame apps use lots of ram, 20meg is hardly a killer.
Friggin use a 16-32meg buffer, thats less than 25cents of ram. Any programmer that just a lame ass OO input class that depends on the language/OS to do
its prebuffering is as lazy as a VBasic programmer. Get of your ass, write the 50 lines of code it takes to make a buffer pre loader.
Lesson one, never trust the OS to do all the magic for you, as your code could be written for any OS but if not then any model of the one OS.
Yes, all windows caches are dumb, they are not content dynamic in nature, they treat all data equally which is wrong, caching a dvd is different to caching
a txt file or an mp3 file. Some require more , some require little.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I just tried this on my Vista 64 PC and I don't have any problem at all. There are other people at 2cpu who don't have this problem either.
Perhaps we're looking at a rather common bug rather than a fundamental design flaw with Vista.
To er is human.
Perhaps they have a driver or hardware problem, when the sound card and network are built into the board, and the board is shitty, or just needs to be flashed.
I play audio while surfing the net and downloading all the time. It's what I do about 90% of the time. I've never seen any sudden performance loss when starting up some audio or video, and I also have built in lan and sound.
I've never had any performance loss in Vista period. It's runs silky smooth all the time, and I'm running on the minimum requirements. It was surprising to see it boot up and run faster than XP did on the other machine here with twice the specs.
I'll file this story under FUD, with all the other ones where the reporter likes to pretend it's still the blue screen of death Windows 98 days.
Yes, you're right on that account!
CIS TOOL MULTIPLATFORM TEST OF SECURITY THAT OVER 30
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=264303&thresh
There @ that url, I watched over 30
No less even setup how they wanted for "Security-Hardening" (& I even asked for BSD variants &/or SeLinux testers, the supposedly MOST SECURE PC *NIX's out there) on the multiplatform CIS TOOL.
Even though the test is backed not only from your own testing, but also from other reputable & reliable sources? Not a one would take that test, though I am certain many did but did not exceed my score on Windows Server 2003, & did not like their score either on the *NIX of their choice by comparison to what I could get on Windows.
(One guy even tried to insinuate it was 'spyware', until COMPUTERWORLD & SANS (respected reputable sources often cited here @
Hilarious...
APK
P.S.=> Some people TALK a good game, such as I see here @
"(Insert *NIX variant here) is more secure or securable than Windows"
Well, I basically said to those that said that, to "put up, or shut up, & put your money where your mouth is, & beat a 84.735/100 score (now up to 85.185 here no less) on the multiplatform CIS tool security test, based on best practices for the platforms its ported to, testing commonalities between them such as ACL/MAC access to critical system state files & folders information (for 1 thing) & IP access (for another) + more... not a 1 would back up their bluster... apk
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be my, as in "not an answerable question". If you assume the GP's premise that only Mac users listen to Coldplay, the very question is invalid, since it asks what would happen in an impossible situation. Therefore, it has no answer. The classical example is the question "have you stopped beating your wife?", to which one normally would not want to answer either "yes" or "no".
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684247. aspx
And for the record, Vista networking IS far faster than XP.
This news is fure FUD This news is fure FUD This news is fure FUD
Who doesn't?
Those with an interest in honor...?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I am quite happy listening to my MP3 tunage with WIN XP PRO w/SP2. I was an early buyer for WIN 95 . . . disappointment ensued. Then I was an early buyer for XP . . . it did not work well until SP2 was rolled in. I'll wait until at least SP2 for Vista. Thanks anyway!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
How about a third option... Linux. That way the next OS Microsoft releases won't suck in the way that Paris Hilton sucks (and not in the good way).
MS really need a kick up the arse to make them sort themselves out.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.