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Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?

Posted by kdawson on from the sound-of-your-network-on-vista dept.

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."

5 of 748 comments (clear)

  1. The hits just keep on rolling for Vista by HangingChad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Re:Could be DRM related by networkBoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:how on earth? by glop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, the CPU scheduler could be at fault. They might want to make sure that your audio does not skip. Therefore the sound-using application might get a higher priority, or other I/O bound applications may be throttled to leave room for the audio and make sure there are not too many network interrupts to service that may block the sound.

    So, you see, it's a feature, not a bug ;-)

  4. Or more accurately by Y2KDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.

  5. Re:Not very accurate by Liquidrage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is. I don't have any idea where all this "it sucks crap" comes from.

    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 /. 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.

    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.