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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.
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
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
Not likely, as on the forums many users report multicore systems being nearly completely idle. Unless the box is phoning home, but even then that should only amount to your broadband speed being absent from the total. Anything that would rob 95% of your TCP stacks should show up as heavy CPU usage. I'm betting money on the PCI handler for the audio being borked.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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!!
Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.
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.
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.
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.
if people are used to Windows...as you say....
then they better not buy Office 2007. its nothing the fsck like Office 2003, 2000, 97, or 95.
They also should keep using XP, because Vista is totally different than XP.
Me - i'm at the point when someone tells me they have a problem with their computer, i say "wow. i don't have that problem. My Mac just works." and i continue my day. I don't think about it, i don't say it smugly. I just don't care.
I stare at them in cold silence because if i told them that my car was blowing up or catching fire or refused to start they'd say "huh.. i'd get a new car, and not the same kind".
I got to the point where i didn't want to help people any more that use Windows. Because i dont care. I can't care. It was consuming all my free time becuase "oh, he can help, he knows computers".
I help my mom, and my wife. I bought my mom a Mac mini, and my wife as a MacBook. And i have never had to reinstall my mom's Mac mini (i reinstalled Windows XP on her HP 4 times).
Everyone else has to fend for themselves - i don't care about their problems with their computers any more.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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.
If that were true, you wouldn't be here. Therefore, since you're here, you're wrong. QED. : )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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?
DRM *only* affects the music and videos you legally purchased. If you want better interoperability and performance, download your music from P2P. That's the ultimate lesson of DRM.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
All the open source media players I am aware of implement the pause feature the same way: by feeding "silence" to the sound card. So by pausing an MP3 you save less than 1% of CPU time decoding your MP3 stream (negligible), but the whole userspace audio subsystem is still sending 48,000 x 2 (stereo) 16-bit samples per second to the kernel...
So I would say it actually reinforces my theory of the audio drivers being in userspace causing this pb.
It would be interesting to run a CPU temperature monitoring app. Pegging the processor will heat up the CPU, you can't lie about that.
Vista sucks rather massively, but I don't think -- unfortunately -- that it really means much of a boost for Linux in the short term.
Windows ME sucked hard, too, and it didn't seem to really push many users off of Windows -- they just skipped that version and Microsoft had to flog their developers a little harder to get something better (XP Home, as memory serves) out quickly. Once Microsoft admits that Vista is a turd and stops trying to polish it, they'll probably grind out something marginally better that they can ram down consumers throats.
As long as the popularity of Linux and other free OSes (or heck, even just alternative OSes that follow reasonable standards and care about interoperability) continues to climb slowly and steadily, Linux can succeed without a "year of."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
First of all, 2007 is halfway over; so far, I haven't seen major user migrations towards Linux, and I highly doubt I'll see any by the end of the year.
People dissatisfied with Vista pre-installed on their laptops don't install Linux; they return the laptops and demand XP.
Yes, it would be nice to see more people using Linux. And more people will start using Linux. Not, however, enough for us to justly call 2007 the Year of Linux.
Businesses still depend on Windows-based solutions, and many have signed pacts with the Devil and can't back out easily. Games are still not written with Linux in mind. Major commercial software products are mostly still unavailable on Linux.
Not until I see e.g. Photoshop and some WoW-equivalent (in popularity, not gameplay) games running natively on Linux will I even begin to think about the Year of Linux.
And to make one point clear: I like my apps open. I don't program, but it gives me a nice, fuzzy, secure feeling.
I also like to play a game from time to time - and when I do, I don't think much about software freedom and open source.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This really isn't fair. I hear what you're saying - I've never owned a Mac, and I've played with them in computer stores, and that's about the extent of it.
But for Mac users, it seems to be more about using a computer with an actual design philosophy - a computer that actually tries to be something, to have its own identity. Like VW Bugs or whatever. Yeah, sure, there are Apple people all over the internet who never shut up about them but the same is true of pretty much every OS user...and least of all from Windows users who tend to be unenthusiastic. They may not hate Windows but I have to laugh every time someone accuses someone else of being a "Windows fanboy." They may exist but as a percentage of the user population, they're insignificant.
Windows is dry, has no personality, and tries to be everything to everyone; jack of all trades, master of none. Windows succeeds because of momentum, sure, but it succeeds even more because the rest of us support the people who don't know any better and wind up with Windows computers in front of them. If we all - Mac, Linux users, even disgruntled but knowledgeable Windows users, agreed to stop helping out horribly stuck Windows people for one year, I wonder how things would change.
The value of Apples to Apple "fanboys" is that they connect with the philosophy behind their design. Just like every car isn't meant for every driver, this is especially true of Macs. The chances of me being a regular Mac user are next to zero but IRL, the most interesting, creative, dynamic, passionate people I have met, have been, disproportionately, Mac users - and just now I'm thinking of old coworkers of mine in Canada, who were not by any stretch of the imagination ignorant (they wrote Windows tech support docs!). I cannot ignore this. I also cannot even consider Apple's place in things without recounting the Apple II series of computers, arguably the most important home computers ever produced. I cannot discount the NUMBER OF HOT CHICKS I have seen in cafes using Macs. (And I say this matters, because it if is so god damned important that computer illiterate seniors be able to use an operating system, which seems to be the standard of measure of an OS's "readiness," then, dammit, the hot chick factor damn well matters too.) - (by which I mean neither should but still)
I really don't understand the hostility toward Mac users some people have. When Mac users start tooting about their systems, at very worst it's insufferably...cute - at *worst*. They love their computers. They don't just live with them or use them mindlessly because it's what they've been given. They love them. I can see why someone who likes the power and access to the actual kernel source code wouldn't dig on them, but I can certainly allow for the fact that we're not all *like that.*
And as a Linux user, I'm down with that. The real problem is OS monoculture, and Mac users and their evangelism are an ally in that fight - to show people that there are alternatives. Every Mac convert is *probably* one less potential zombie in a botnet. Different strokes...
I continue to be puzzled at people who have issues with Macs or Mac users. Yeah, I don't think the platform is as free and open as it could or should be. I've read about sporadic hardware problems, and frankly I think Steve Jobs is a complete asshole (I am, like most hobbyists, a Woz groupie, however). I understand the excesses of the lifestyle branding Apple has engaged in. But I don't think that's nearly as influential in the lives of Mac die-hards as the commercials would have us believe. Most Mac users I know have used Macs for years and years, sometimes going all the way back to Apple IIes. They're tools they've carried through their lives, the way some of us carry Leatherman supertools around - school papers, resumes, job letters, love letters, visual and audio artwork, manifestoes, and so on.
I'm just perplexed how such a small minority could be irritating or offensive or whatever it is you're suggesting in your above post.
Our real enemy is obvious: People who mistitle every humorous mp3 as being by WEIRD AL YANKOVIC. Those fucking people need wedgies. Can we not all agree on this?
OTOH, Windows Home Server will be a Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) variant - so they're still working on the old line.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
It is. I don't have any idea where all this "it sucks crap" comes from.
/. there's tons of jokes, a few ignorant posts from complete morons, a few valid complaints from non-ignorant morons, and then several posts from people that have actually used it an like it.
1st hand experience with it here. I like it better then XP. I'm posting from Vista. I don't have crashes. I don't have hangups. It handles software errors much more gracefully. And as said, and no, I'm not joking, with Aero turned off the experience is faster then XP.
Typically when Vista gets bought up on
Due to hardware and XP stability there's not a great reason for home upgrade IMO. But hardware compat is getting better and better all the time. For the enterprise, we're not on it at my place, no major reason to be currently. And like most enterprises we don't upgrade OS's. We buy hardware with an OS installed. Vista is probably a few years off since XP is pretty decent and there's no hurry to upgrade.
But 99% of the knocking Vista posts here are 100% ignorant prattle and nothing more.
And that's the real problem with Vista. There's no reason to have it. It doesn't do anything new. It doesn't work better than XP. It doesn't even work as well as XP. And it's shackled with a bunch of stupid features that only help avoid problems that the kinds of users on /. wouldn't have in the first place.
If you'd asked me in 1997, having to click "OK" or "Allow" multiple times every time I want to change an icon on the desktop, or copy a file from a USB harddrive isn't exactly what I would have expected to be doing in 2007. This is ludicrous. The software isn't getting smarter, it's getting stupider. I have to OK every little stupid action because there's no way for MS to know if I'm doing it or malware is doing it. It's funny, I don't have these hassles with Linux. MS's attitude is that they simply cannot provide real security so they foist all the responsibility on the user. To me, Vista is a step backwards in usability.
Good thing I'm running Ubuntu, where time actually moves forwards.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm also a consultant and I know that professionally, number of platforms is a really big Linux issue.
Right, so as a consultant, *you* do the choosing for your clients. It is up to *you* to choose and recommend the solution that matches the needs of your client. This is the job of consultants in every industry, and in every industry there are almost always competing solutions to any particular problem.
So pick one
For the open source community as a whole, that is never going to happen. It's not an open source thing, it's a human nature thing. Of course, within the community there will be smaller groups that make choices, eg. Ubuntu choosing GNOME as its desktop environment - in fact most distributions make a choice of the default and/or supported desktop.
picking standards and increasing interoperability is a very big part of the effort.
Absolutely, and this is already happening. In quite a few key areas the two desktop platforms are already cooperating on standards and other areas of common ground; but it is unrealistic for you to expect one camp to throw away everything and basically say "whoops, sorry everyone - we got it completely wrong, the other camp were right so we'll use all their stuff now.". Of course that's an exaggeration, but to me that's pretty much what you'd like to see happen.
It seems to me that this is more of a marketing problem. Perhaps if you, the consultant, were to push "the KDE desktop" or "the GNOME desktop", or heck even "the Ubuntu desktop" instead of "the Linux desktop", the issue of competing solutions would not even need to be brought up with your clients.