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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."
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
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
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.
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Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.
Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and some fanboys will refuse to believe it with one anecdotal test....
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.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
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?
That's a low ID? :)
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
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.
Run along, newbie.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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?
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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... =)
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).
It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM
0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx
See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
Who are you calling a newbie, newbie?
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
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
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
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.
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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
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.