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."

Comments

Not a hardware issue, and may not DRM, either

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:how on earth?

[torkus]

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.

Re:DRM strikes again?

[smooc]

It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM

See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx

Call me old-skool, but...

[Doctor Memory]

You can see why they would reserve some hard drive bandwidth though; as the GP said it is to provide skip-free audio Back in my day (and that was early last Thursday), we had this thing called "buffering", where you actually read more data than you needed, and then when you needed more you got if from the buffer instead of going all the way back out to the disk. Some of us actually used two buffers, and filled one from disk while reading data from the other. This gave us a fair amount of isolation from I/O scheduling and transfer delays. Guess that just shows what fools we were, instead of coming up with a fancy bandwidth reservation scheme to regulate everything.

Hand me down my silly-scope, Maw, the danged computer's a-runnin' slow agin...

Re:DRM strikes again?

[Bazar]

"Actually more likely is the services which handles media getting more cpu time is doing just that, prioritising the audio over the network. Or, it could be HD sound they're playing which is clogging up the limited bandwidth on the PCI bus." Modern pc's, use a gigabit controler, to offload the bandwidth and processing, before it reaches the pci bus.

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

Re:how on earth?

[Touvan]

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).

Re:DRM strikes again?

[orcrist]

Unless it can turn the speakers into sonar transcievers all the processing in the world isn't going to be able to do that effectivly.

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.