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

DRM strikes again?

[It doesn't come easy]

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...

Re:DRM strikes again?

[trolltalk.com]

"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."

... even when sound output is *paused*?

If a plain duron from the turn of the century could handle 100mps ethernet and play mp3s, there's something seriously wrong with Vista not being able to do the same on modern hardware.

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

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:DRM strikes again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern pc's, use a gigabit controler, to offload the bandwidth and processing, before it reaches the pci bus.

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.

Re:DRM strikes again?

[Grishnakh]

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.

So why is this necessary on a laptop with 2 speakers?

Re:DRM strikes again?

[Grishnakh]

If a plain duron from the turn of the century could handle 100mps ethernet and play mp3s, there's something seriously wrong with Vista not being able to do the same on modern hardware.

There's nothing "wrong" with it. It's what we must accept so that our good friends at the RIAA can make sure we're not stealing their excellent music, performed by such brilliant, talented artists like Britney Spears.

Re:DRM strikes again?

[jollyreaper]

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. So why is this necessary on a laptop with 2 speakers? Vista is taking into account the delay in the audio reaching your cojoined twin's head? Either that or Vista sucks, not sure which is the more likely explanation.

Re:DRM strikes again?

[bberens]

Disclaimer: I run linux servers as well as vista, I'm not particularly biased in any one direction. /. is no place for that kind of rubbish talk

Re:DRM strikes again?

[apt142]

Type mismatch found on line 4.
Talented artists like Britney Spears
---------------------^

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.

Re:DRM strikes again?

[orcrist]

Hey, you're the Navy tech, you tell me.

I'm going to assume the question is serious. There is no fundamental difference between speakers and microphones other than using materials which allow for more efficient functionality in one direction. It's like electrical motors and generaters; in fact a speaker is a kind of motor which converts electrical energy to kinetic energy, and a microphone is a kind of generator which converts kinetic energy to electrical energy; each can act in the other direction, just with less efficiency. Modern Sonar is generally passive, i.e. uses the "microphone" functionality so I mentioned that version. But an active array is essentially a bunch of speakers + microphones, etc.

The point of my response was to address the implication that Sonar is using some special kind of technology that isn't comparable to speakers and audio processing. It's not. It's just a matter of degree and specialization. The simple case of adding phase-delays so that disparate audio signals are synchronized is something commercial sound studios have been able to do since the 60's with analog electronics (or actually any electronics hobbiest), and something every sound card that can generate stereo has been able to do digitally since -- well I'm not sure when the first stereo sound cards came out... sometime in the 80's?

Re:DRM strikes again?

[myowntrueself]

Modern pc's, use a gigabit controler, to offload the bandwidth and processing, before it reaches the pci bus.

Dude, who taught you punctuation? Arnold Rimmer??

Conspiracy!

[suso]

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.

how on earth?

[networkBoy]

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

Re:how on earth?

[sunami88]

How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?
My 0.02? Its all the DRM piling up at an astounding rate, bringing the network to its knees.

CHECK SECURITY CERTIFICATE...NOT FOUND
CHECK SECURITY CERTIFICATE...NOT FOUND
CHECK SECURITY CERTIFICATE...NOT FOUND

And so on and so forth. Could be wrong though.

Re:how on earth?

[glop]

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 ;-)

Re:how on earth?

[DigitalSorceress]

My guess is that it's a deliberate attempt to make sure that users aren't streaming the music out over the network.

DRM sucks... it's gotten so bad that they're interfering with all sorts of normal (non-infringing) activities in the hopes of getting the genie back in the bottle. When will they learn that it's too little, too late.

I mean, what? I'm supposed to choose between listening to music, or doing my job? BAH!

Every day, MacOS and Linux are looking better and better.

Re:how on earth?

[MillionthMonkey]

How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?

The smoke from the cigars mixes in the air of the smoke-filled back rooms where these things are decided between the content cartel and the company that makes Windows Media Central or whatever that thing used to be called.

Re:how on earth?

[LWATCDR]

Actually that sort of makes sense. The question then is does it effect other IO? Maybe writing to a drive? Would it show up in task manager?
So far I find you explanation the most likely if unpopular.
I sort of want some proof before I start stringing people up.

Re:how on earth?

[TheRaven64]

My guess would be that it's a bug in the PCI code. You interact with network and sound hardware in roughly the same way; write a memory address to a control register and the device DMAs it across. If there's a race condition or stale lock in the code that deals with the PCI bus then data being sent from the network or sound card drivers down through the PCI abstraction layer could be delayed. My guess would be that someone decided to optimise things for media playback, and so put the sound drivers at a higher priority than the network drivers (since most of the time you are more likely to notice audio skipping than slight drops in network performance), and the sound card driver is not releasing a lock in a timely fashion.

This, of course, comes with a huge disclaimer to the effect that I have no inside information as to the structure of the Vista kernel, and might be completely making all of this up.

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:how on earth?

[Silver Sloth]

My guess is that it's a deliberate attempt to make sure that users aren't streaming the music out over the network. Nah, this looks far more like run of the mill incompetence.

Re:how on earth?

[AshtangiMan]

I sort of want some proof before I start stringing people up.

You must be new here . . . but how did you grab such a low UID?

Re:how on earth?

[sinator]

That's a low ID? :)

Re:how on earth?

[Just Some Guy]

Run along, newbie.

Re:how on earth?

[GIL_Dude]

Well we do know that there are new API's in Vista that allow reservations of bandwidth for devices (like disk drives) and that media player does indeed make use of them (this has been demonstrated at events like Tech-Ed and Mark Russinovich's talks have contained demonstrations of this as well). I can't imagine that they purposefully tried to reserve network bandwidth though when the files are local on your hard drive. You can see why they would reserve some hard drive bandwidth though; as the GP said it is to provide skip-free audio and is indeed a new Vista feature. Sounds like they either have a bug with it where it reserves network bandwidth when it doesn't need to, or it is something to do with it having to reserve a certain percentage of the total number of interrupts regardless of which device is being triggered?

Re:how on earth?

[MightyMartian]

I have a hard time believing that DRM alone would be responsible for this overhead. This sounds much more like some sort of scheduling problem.

Re:how on earth?

[eggoeater]

This, of course, comes with a huge disclaimer to the effect that I have no inside information as to the structure of the Vista kernel, and might be completely making all of this up. Yeah, I think that might be Microsoft's problem as well.

Re:how on earth?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

Back in 2003, my ethernet card (under debian) would *only* work if I was also playing music. Granted, that was because my ethernet card was broken and didn't properly send interrupts (so the sound card was sending them, and the ethernet driver was being activated when it noticed that it had an interrupt too), but it was still pretty awesome. Perhaps Vista has a similar problem... =)

Re:how on earth?

[The MAZZTer]

Vista does put in place measures to ensure that multimedia applications have a higher I/O priority than other operations.

Whoever did these tests should try again with the Multimedia Class Scheduler service disabled to see if it makes a difference. Also they need to try multiple multimedia applications (WMP would benefit from MCS, but other multimedia apps may not yet).

Re:how on earth?

[Trails]

Grampa? But... we thought you were dead...

Re:how on earth?

[pla]

What sound is being sent to the card when the track is paused?

Don't rule out the possibility that they have the sound card "playing" silence when you pause the player. Particularly if they use fade-cuts, dynamic range compression, or really any time-lagged processing of the sound, it may take considerably less effort to feed the buffer with silence rather than actually stopping playback.

Of course, that still has nothing to do with slowing down the network, but I'd consider it as the most likely explanation for why paused playback still causes the problem.

Re:how on earth?

[Isaac-Lew]

Pot/kettle/black

Re:how on earth?

[phil reed]

Run along, newbie.

Who are you calling a newbie, newbie?

Re:how on earth?

[Just Some Guy]

Pot/kettle/black

There is one thing that can summon the Great Old Ones.

One.

And that is the implication that someone with a higher UID is one of them.

I claim my prize for having successfully beckoned a few and retire to the library for brandy and cigars.

Re:how on earth?

[Aceticon]

You must be new here . . . but how did you grab such a low UID?

The Slashdor ID was probably inherited from a "wierd uncle" which died in a strange accident in his basement when a pile of old Sun workstations fell on top of him.

Re:how on earth?

[jandrese]

The thing is, you can't buy a new computer anymore that has XP installed. It's all Vista these days and you don't even get a choice. That's why it is inevitable that people will switch to Vista, they'll buy a new computer for whatever reason and not have the choice to stick with XP no matter how much they might want to.

Re:how on earth?

[Reziac]

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).

Re:how on earth?

[trogdor8667]

Actually, if I remember correctly (and I very well may not), we had a Microsoft Recruiter on campus late last year, and he was demoing the final release of Vista (not yet released), and I remember him talking about the priority of threads in Vista. He showed us WMP with no other applications running (music played fine, the visualizations ran flawlessly). Then he closed WMP. Opened a program he had written to basically cause increased CPU usage. He then opened task-manager, and then WMP again, and played the same track. Everything on the system slowed, but the song never missed a beat, and the CPU usage was at 100%. He ended the program, CPU usage dropped back to normal, and the song (and visualizations) didn't miss anything.

So, based on this (and how accurate my memory is), I'd say that Vista definitely gives priority to audio over other resources.

Re:how on earth?

[latro]

You know, this can go on all day...

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:how on earth?

[jsebrech]

The irony is that the hardest core of early slashdot users don't have low uid's, because they resisted creating accounts to protect their privacy.

Re:how on earth?

[Paul Crowley]

Yeah, I resisted for like about three minutes.

The hits just keep on rolling for Vista

[HangingChad]

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.

Re:The hits just keep on rolling for Vista

[gravyface]

Vista network performance is *supposed* to be better: "support for the Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" and "TCP/IP window size auto-tuning" are two features that the Que book, "Using Microsoft Windows Vista" describes. This audio issue is probably related to DRM, however.

There are some things that sound good, but I had to dig to find them -- "I/O cancellation" is one of them. I don't know how many times I've had a client crash their desktop when trying to access a non-synched shared folder when disconnected from their laptop; this is supposed to allow you to cancel requests to unresponsive network and hardware resources, but I've yet to try it out.

Wow!

[ArcherB]

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!

Re:Wow!

[gEvil (beta)]

Wow! I bet streaming audio must suck!

Whatever you do, absolutely do not try this with RealPlayer on Vista. That has the potential to result in catastrophic system failure.

Re:Wow!

[dyslexicbunny]

I just tried it ago five minutes ago. As soon as I started streaming, all my cable in the house caught fire and my house burned down. Then a Microsoft guy came and peed on the ashes. It was awful.

Re:Wow!

[TommydCat]

[--Streaming witty comment--72%--Please Wait--]

Not Just MP3's Slowing Network Performance

[MarkToronto]

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.

Re:Could be DRM related

[networkBoy]

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

Re:coldplay

[everphilski]

Seeing as the speed of sound is proportional to the square root of temperature, and the group is coldplay, it might not be very fast at all :)

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.

Microsoft user here.

[Pojut]

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.

Audio fingerprinting?

[apodyopsis]

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.

I can find a reference for video fingerprinting which quite explains things more eloquently then me : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerp rinting

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.

Or more accurately

[Y2KDragon]

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

Re:Or more accurately

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Continuing your reasoning, I see few reasons anyone would use XP as an OS over 2K...
except Microsoft no longer offers updates for 2K, and Visual Studio plays more nicely
with XP (for example, the DirectX SDK hasn't installed on 2K for two years).

This will eventually provide your reason for people to use Vista: They will have little
choice.

Re:Or more accurately

[oliverthered]

Wine have just moved the direct 3d layer from glx over to wgl, this should mean that it will compile on windows any time soon.

And as soon as it gets directX 10 support you should be able to run the DX10 only games on XP.

Re:Or more accurately

[ookabooka]

Ever want to do some x64 development (with windows apps, don't bother replying "USE LINUX")? Try windows xp x64. . .vista is the holy grail compared to that thing. . . Anyways, Vista actually utilizes all 4 core of my computer and all 8 gigs of memory. Granted thats while playing solitaire but still, nice to know it isn't going to waste :) Honestly though, it is by far the best 64-bit OS from MS that I have seen, everything else is either targetted towards servers, lacking some common desktop functionality and/or has maybe 1/100th the driver support regular ol' XP does.

Re:Or more accurately

[nschubach]

I hear Duke Nukem Forever is exclusive to Windows PecanPie and DirectX 11 (Whipped Cream Edition) since it could never run on some weak DX10 platform due to the new hyper-channel mega buss that cannot be back-ported into such a weak platform. They also claim at least 349% boost to disk access rates simply by using off the shelf Microsoft Win-SSD Ultra drives (available only at a premium price of 40% above other drives).

Synopsis

[stinerman]

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.

It's a tough one for users....?

[gsfprez]

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.

Prioritizing multimedia?

[R.Mo_Robert]

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...

Re:coldplay

[Just Some Guy]

What if you play the song Speed of sound by coldplay??? What will Vista do then?

Mu. Only Mac users listen to Coldplay.

Iterative Development Cycle

[Enonu]

I really hope Microsoft adopts an iterative development and release cycle on the order of around every six months for Windows some time in the future.

• 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_10. 0_.28Cheetah.29/, which might be the sweet spot, but I bet they could do better.

Big-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.

My PC Did Something Similar

[UdoKeir]

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.

Re:antiFUD of poorest quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and some fanboys will refuse to believe it with one anecdotal test....

Clearly

[Colin Smith]

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.

Audio drivers in userspace ?

[this great guy]

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.

Re:FUD of highest quality

[Applekid]

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.

Re:not really

[gsfprez]

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.

Make it work / DRM

[dpilot]

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...

Windows License Exchange/Refunds?

[NeuroManson]

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.

Re:Could be DRM related

[rcpitt]

Has anyone checked to see if the CPU usage display is really correct?

Maybe Redmond in their infinite wisdom are hiding all the DRM processing in a way that doesn't show up on the CPU use graphs - but impacts the system performance because in reality the CPUs are all pegged doing DRM compares to see if heuristic signatures match copyright violations.

Possibly Performance Timers?

[mdarksbane]

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.

Maybe its because...

[hacker]

Perhaps they're sending your music up the network pipe for comparison and analysis as you play?
</theory>

My Guess

[Nom du Keyboard]

My guess is that Vista is intensively scanning the sound hardware to ensure that all the voltages and other parameters remain in compliance -- and hiding this fact from the user. It's well known that part of the Vista DRM infection is that it checks to ensure that the Secure Audio Path remain intact, and that part of this is that it tries very hard to detect any "illegal" modifications or equipment.

Vista is just overall a hugely bad idea -- the idea being the Hollywood now owns your PC.

It's actually a very good forum-thread article

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:For teh win

[Just Some Guy]

I am not a number.

No, you're not. He hasn't posted in a while.

Re:you're being passive aggressive

[ischorr]

I always wondered WHY OS X was designed to be so utterly foreign, and incomprehensible for Windows users to pick up. I never understood why you have to stand on a balance bar and lean to interact with the computer. Or why you have to punch a dog in the face to launch a new application. Or why their display device is a constantly reshaping bowl of mashed bananas.

I guess they just want to Think Different, but you'd think that they'd use desktop and GUI concepts similar to what Windows uses. And yet strangely, several million Windows users started using Macs this year.

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:Could be DRM related

[Eponymous Bastard]

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.

Except...

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:you're being passive aggressive

[ischorr]

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.

Not very accurate

[Liquidrage]

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.

Re:Not very accurate

[Liquidrage]

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.

Re:Incompetence! Opportunity!

[cp.tar]

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.

Disclaimer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm twitter. You might now me because I've posted over seven thousand times on Slashdot. While the post above this one might seem like it contains statements of fact, it is in reality nothing more than my own speculations, which I base partly on the twisting and misrepresentation of facts and personal anecdotes, partly on my religious attachment to software, and partly on my weird hatred of Microsoft.

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.

The truth about Vista sound

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Incompetence! Opportunity!

[gatesvp]

Actually, I think it means a boost for Apple (so kind of Linux :) rather than Linux directly. Apple is intended to be a consumer desktop system and it does this very well. Linux variants are undoubtedly improving, but (in my experience) unlike Apple, the Linux systems are simply not designed to be consumer desktop system. If somebody actually did this, then you'd have an Apple competitor.

But Linux development seems more focused on generating dozens of distros and taking all of the forks in the road instead of picking something and sticking with it. For the simple example look at KDE vs GNOME. You can argue back and forth about the merits of both, but as a person building software I don't want to have to make screenshots for both and test under both, this is just needless doubling of my work.

Linux does not encourage the development of shrink-wrapped, quick-to-develop software. Part of making a consumer (non-business) OS is making decisions for the consumer (b/c they don't know how) and then to sticking with those. We can yell about the Windows Registry, but Linux has how many "replacements" (all of them better)? How does this help consumers? All it does is make things more complicated for developers rather than simpler.

Linux is like the giant sandbox of great ideas, it constantly gets better, but it's goals is not be a consumer desktop OS. Until somebody stands up and says: "This is THE linux consumer OS and EVERYTHING done for consumer (not business) needs will work here", until that day, disgruntled MS users will simply shift to MAC.