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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.
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.
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
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!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
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
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.
My blog
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.
Living With a Nerd
Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.
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.
Mu. Only Mac users listen to Coldplay.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and some fanboys will refuse to believe it with one anecdotal test....
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.
Deleted
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.
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.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
No, you're not. He hasn't posted in a while.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Hand me down my silly-scope, Maw, the danged computer's a-runnin' slow agin...
Just junk food for thought...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Infuriate left and right
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.