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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."
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.
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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
That's great but 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? Even with the bloatware that is know as Vista...playing a MP3 can't need more power than opening Excel or Word.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Did you follow the link in TFS and offer your expertise to those having problems? Did you disclose your hardware configuration? We could all degenerate into a Microsoft flame fest or the solution could come to light and put the whole thing to bed.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM
0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx
See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
Hand me down my silly-scope, Maw, the danged computer's a-runnin' slow agin...
Just junk food for thought...
Unless your using a pci network card, or a fairly old/cheap motherboard, it should have nothing to do with the available bandwidth on the pci bus
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Back in the dark ages before WinAmp, I used a DOS music player (XTCplay) that displayed percent of CPU cycles in use, so I have good benchmarks:
My 486DX2-66 could not play MP3s; the CPU was pegged solid at 100% usage, and at best they still skipped and stalled.
My P90 could play MP3s, but it took 80%-100% of the CPU cycles, so would sometimes skip.
On my P233, it took about 30%-40% of CPU cycles.
On my P3-550 (Win98), it takes about 3%, for either the old DOS player or for WinAmp. Its twin brother (WinXPPro) also uses about 3% in WinAmp. These systems are 8 years old.
On a modern P4, I'd expect playing MP3s would need only a fraction of a percent of CPU cycles. So even if very poorly scheduled, how could the sound subsystem use them all up??
I'm wondering if a crappy network driver might be the actual culprit. I've seen a shit driver bring a P2 to a near-halt, when the only app in use was DOOM (which will run on a 386, so you know it doesn't eat much by current standards).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Your zealotry appears to have overwhelmed your sarcasm detector.
My point was that OS X does NOT have an "utterly foreign" interface as the GGP stated. My examples were obviously bogus; you don't really have to do these things...Unless you really HAVE punched a dog in the face in order to launch a new application in OS X - in which case I wonder if you should be allowed near technology at all.
What? Your typical modern nic might do TCP checksums but that's about it. They are not esoteric, specialty devices running your tcp/ip stack. The only way anything gets to the card is via the pci bus. Whether the card does the checksum or not the amount of data is the same. Even for cards that do have their own IP stacks, you will still be running over 95% of the data over the PCI bus. The only case where that'll not happen is if you are exclusively using terminal interactive TCP sessions (think telnet or ssh). If you browse the web at all, the payload swamps the overhead.
The issue here is that Vista's sound subsystem does a lot more audio processing that previous generations do. For example it will delay the streams to your multichannel system so that the sound from each speaker reaches your head at exactly the same time.
Interestingly, I've noticed much faster internet downloads after having switched to Ubuntu from Windows XP. I didn't expect to see a difference in performance in that way (if anything, I was willing to sacrifice some performance - like I do with games on my silly ATI card). I have been very pleasantly surprised with some other performance related advantages in Ubuntu as well. When my harddrive is completely full in Ubuntu, I can still use it (it actually doesn't slow down very much, if at all). In Windows XP, the whole system slows down little by little after the hard drive is more than half full, becoming almost unusable when it fills completely (I usually do a hard reset and get into Ubuntu to delete some files, rather than wait for XP to do whatever it must be doing with the swap file).
http://www.unfocus.com/
Explain to me the difference between speakers and sonar tranceivers? I mean, I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy for only 4 years, so maybe I missed something, but a sonar array is basically a bunch of high-quality underwater microphones and a shitload of audio processing. Essentially doing the reverse of what the poster above claimed Vista does (never mind that that kind of processing ability is what sound cards are *for*). IOW: you're wrong.
As long as you have more than one channel, audio processing can do exactly that sort of thing; the only problem is, that it would ruin the whole point of multiple channels. You want the audio processing to cause the sounds to reach your ears at different times because than it simulates what happens when something is not directly in front of you. The initial implentation of this technology for consumer purposes has a very familiar name: stereo.
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