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MS Responds To Vista's Network / Audio Problems
quirdan writes "With the discovery last week of the connection between Vista's poor networking performance and audio activities, word quickly spread around the Net. No doubt this got Microsoft's attention, and they have responded to the issue. Microsoft states that 'some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not'; and that they are working on technical documentation, as well as applying a slight sugar coating to the symptoms. Apparently they believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight,' only affects reception of data, and that this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3."
Remember folks, this is a feature, not a bug.
Two plus two is five. War is peace. Rinse, repeat.
They just said a 90% performance hit to an unrelated system is normal? So where's the "defective by design" tag?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
No, the network speed drops to ~10-15% of non-audio playing speed. Very significant issue.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Back in 1994, I bought a Power Macintosh 7100. One of the first PPC chips, about 66MHz, and running a positively archaic operating system.
I still have the machine, and drag it out from time to time. When this story broke, I pulled it out of storage to test it, and see how it compared. With a 10/100 ethernet card in, running the mac's System 7.5.3, it could successfully play an MP3 while transferring, and it made no difference whatsoever to send or receive speed over the network.
Take note Microsoft: 1994, 66MHz, System 7.5.3, more than 13 fricken years ago.
That was the response of a MS tech regarding a defect that a bunch of us found in one of their C libraries some years ago. They must have had that guy train his successors.
To say nothing of traditional multithreading, how do they explain how the entire OS could be run on either of my cores, but just networking and multimedia can't run together on both of them without some kind of tradeoff?
I couldn't begin to keep track of how many times I've heard that one in the industry. 'X is broken'. 'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apparently they believe an almost 10% drop in networking performance is 'slight,' only affects reception of data, and that this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3.
Interesting, VERY interesting. This either means that Microsoft Programmers are incredibly incompetent or they are hiding something. I can take a really old Linux kernel (or windows 98 install) on a Pentium 233 mmx processor and see less than 0.05% drop in networking performance while playing an mp3. In fact I dont see that drop playing 2 mp3's at the same time while transferring large amounts of data over 100 base T. I do this daily on my whole house mp3 jukebox that is linux based, it has 2 seperate sound cards that plays 2 different mp3 files while I upload another 60-80 mp3 files I corrected the data tags on. I do not see the performance hit of 10% on hardware that is at least 20 to 30 times slower than the typical Vista machine.
What are they hiding?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I knew it, they finally broke internet radio.
First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations.
So I see! All that matters is the Internet performance of the average user, which is probably what, less than 5Mbps anyway! How silly of me to think there would be a problem with say... trying to access a corporate file server to work with say really big data files? Wow, I'm really going to recommend Vista to my clients now!
Oh, I see,
as in "slightly pregnant" or "slightly dead"??
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
You know its crap like this that contributed to a modestly minor personal project of mine that I undertook at the end of last week.
I bought a laptop at best buy (well, it was sort of a back to school gift), just a cheap 350 buck one, nothing fancy, just something to take notes and do powerpoint on. Its a 1.6 pentium M with 512 of ram....but oh, guess what It came with? Yes thats right, vista. Not only did the thing take 5 whole minutes to boot up to display the draconian EULA, it actually froze when I rejected it.
After a reformat and a night of fetching drivers off the internet (the only CD that came with the laptop is a Vista restore disc that I will be returning when I demand my OS refund), I installed XP on it.
From post to desktop in 40 seconds, and with 95% less draconian DRM (lowsy WGA crap).
Apparently they believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight,'
Huh?? When? Surely not here if playing music anyway. That sounds like a bug, but is it a driver problem or exactly what?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Can I run Vista on Linux? ...
VISTA IS A OS?! No... you`re kidding me...
FTA:
"The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off."
Granted, I don't want my audio stuttering, but the idea that the CPU can't keep up because of file transfer is insane. Maxing out an ethernet connection doesn't take much CPU. Even if we put the audio at a very high priority, I don't see how that would immediately degrade ethernet performance by 90%. I could accept no more than about 5% in a worse case scenario.
To be fair if I renice rhythmbox to 18 and transfer a file, things go to hell. Renicing to 10 clears it up. I saw no degradation of speed. Apparently Debian can do file transfers at full speed while playing an mp3 on a rather old PC*. Something isn't right here...
*Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB DDR
When I used vista I didn't see a slow down in network speeds, but at the time I was reorganising media on my hard disk, I started at 10gigabyte file transfer, vista stopped, completely stopped literrally, its like i was running vista on a 66mhz processor, it was not funny, 1hour later when I had reinstalled XP it was much better.
Oh, please. You're right that Vista is a more capable operating system than Mac OS 7. You're wrong that it would have any implication on audio playback.
I can encode a 320mbit VBR MP3 at about 20X playback speed. That's encoding, the slow phase. MP3 playback is NOT a real-time task. It hasn't been for ages. The system decodes the next several seconds of audio, stores it in an audio buffer, and tells the system to play it. If you hit pause, it then stops the active playback immediately, but there's still more audio data available. This way, there's no reason for the audio to skip, and the audio program doesn't need to be top priority or realtime.
Ironically the only audio program I've had problems with skipping under Windows is iTunes, and only when running some other task at 100%.
In any case, audio programs don't need realtime priority and there's no reason why playing audio should cause network performance to degrade in a properly designed system. I can see a poorly designed system manage to completely screw things up with interrupt handling, though.
--
Sigs are lame.
Oh, yeah, Vista is famous for it's backwards compatibility these days; particularly with it's drivers, internets and multimedia applications. Those are known to work flawlessly and without intentional downgrades in quality and so on.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
"In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design."
I know we've been over this before. But for whom are we 'improv[ing] multimedia playback'? Is it really an issue in 2007, to perform a network transfer and play an MP3? Or is it Vista's "secure audio path" that is responsible for this? Remember, this is the same Vista that polls your hardware every few ms to check if you're playing 'premium content'.
I know not everything bad Microsoft does is done with forethought and malice (..) but really now. After reading the 'cost analysis of Vista content protection', can you not understand the apprehension? If some "multimedia" (albeit not 'premium content', but who's counting) is played, other parts of the system deliberately go into a 'limited' state? After reading that, does it sound like a bug to you?
"But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback."
I call shenanigans.
Even if this is a legitimate "bug", i.e. the Vista testers were actually experiencing crackling audio while performing high bandwidth network transfers, who made the conscious decision to throttle the *network* instead of fixing the audio path and audio drivers? Windows XP had no problems performing high-bandwidth transfers and using the sound simultaneously. Besides normal operating system scheduling there was no 'throttling' of any device A when any device B activates. This is Vista content protection backfiring, plain and simple.
Nobody could expect Microsoft to come up with an OS that does two things well at the same time. That would be multitasking. We're decades away from the invention of computers that can do that.
Networking is overrated also. It's probably just a fad that will fade away once we all get high density flash storage for our sneakernets.
Music? If you wanted to do artsy iLife stuff like that you should have bought an iFruit.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"performance hit is obviously expected behaviour" and from the article, "Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback"
That is utter BS. On a decade old machine, its possible to run a network and audio playback at real time speeds. Given the power of even low end PCs these days (minimum spec Vista machines) its crazy they cannot handle both together.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
There are two interesting things about this matter:
1. How retarded the predictions of the Slashdot user base were. Look at this for example, which along with all of the other DRM blather was from another universe.
2. How retarded the response from the Slashdot user base to their explanation is. Despite explaining the purpose of the scheduling trade-off, people harp on about their 20 year old computers and their stellar mp3 playback over slow links. You've sure showed Microsoft, tough guys!
What they've said makes sense. It sounds buggy though, as it should be difficult for GbE or audio playback to saturate the CPU enough to legitimately run into the scheduling conflicts that would starve network performance significantly.
It seems that most of the technically-oriented people left Slashdot for greener pastures, leaving a pool of insipid teenagers in their wake. Thanks for reminding me why I didn't read this site for three years, you monkeys.
Uhh, based on what tests? Guys in forums saying "My FTP ran at this speed before, now it runs at this speed."? That isn't a reliable metric, shocking as it may seem to people on Slashdot.
Or something by that name is probably what is responsible for this behavior (I'm in Ubuntu right now, which I'm noting is running games better than XP and way better than Vista...)
"In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design" - but why is this needed?? Any computer capable of running Vista should have no problem playing back all but the most highest quality HD content and any computer with a good performance rating should be able to do this as well.
I have been running Vista Ultimate x64 (with most shit turned off) on a dual core 4200+ with 4GB of RAM since RTM and my overall satisfactory level is not good at all. I ran XP x64 for about a year before this and I absolutely loved it!!
The big question I have with Vista is why Microsoft choose to do all these little gimmics and tricks. ReadyBoost, SuperFetch, and most importanly Multimedia Class Schedualer are all jokes. I would love to turn off Multimedia Class Scheduler but you cant - the entire audio system depends on it.
The service description reads "Enables relative prioritization of work based on system-wide task priorities. This is intended mainly for multimedia applications. If this service is stopped, individual tasks resort to their default priority."
If common sense was dynamite, could anyone in Redmond blow their nose?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I spent a few hours un-optimizing the optimization services, etc.. in Vista to get it to run semi-smooth on a 1 gig of memory "built for vista" system this last weekend. There is still disk access when the computer is fully booted and entirely idle, that I can not get rid of for some reason. I suspect alot of R&D went into several layers of the optimization process, probably mostly because Vista is a 800 lb hog, and the network/audio one will be the first of many to pop up during it's lifetime.
Oh and PS dear MS, pre-loading apps into memory for the possibility they will be launched = bad idea and waste of resource. Ditto on constant indexing.
Maybe they don't care at all about deployment of Vista.
We harp on MS a lot, but they ARE clever in certain ways. Suppose someone is thinking Big Picture in some kind of twisted sense. They can play a variant of GoodGuy/BadGuy by having a "Sacrificial OS" every 8 years. They're somehow getting us to pay for their beta testing. They HAD to get Vista out, period, and rely on their patented brand of bluster to get through it. They were getting serious heat from inactivity. I bet someone got utterly crushed when they had to switch codebases during that dev setback.
I barely heard of Win Me - consecutive tips told me to get Win2000, which lasted me through 2.5 OS changes from MS. Then in the early days, I saw a lovely crash&burn act on XP *SP2* until everyone repaired their firmware. I even had some flash devices that I had to return until the factory shipped ones with newer firmware.
Now XP is their heavy duty workhorse while they experiment with their new codebase. Suppose just for a moment that Vista NEVER works... but what they learned from Vista SP1 gets applied to Windows 7 (anyone got a codename yet?). Then maybe by 2010 all the results of history on the media scene will be in, maybe they will back off from DRM, and take some other focus. If they don't screw it up, Vista will be that smile in techie's forums, Windows 7 will be the new 8 year workhorse, and off we go ever after.
Having cash flow the size of a country must be fun.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You mean to say "its." Don't use "it's" for possessive. Windows Vista may not be completely backwards compatible, but it comes a lot closer than their closed competitor (Apple).
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna is the only artist with any talent. The others are lame imitations!
What a load of utter Crap! If such a trade-ff was ever necessary, then we would have been seeing it in Win XP as well, and obviously we don't.
Vista networking is broken! Try copying over files from your XP machine on a mapped drive if you don't believe me. And audio/video functions in Vista are equally broken. And I bet its for the same reason: Kiss-Up To Hollywood DRM.
Microsoft has caved to the almighty Hollywood dollar, and with Vista you're pwned more than ever!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The decoding process is the only computationally intensive part of playback and that can go on in the background at low priority... so long as there's decoded audio queued up it doesn't matter if the mp3 decoding is deferred even *seconds* at a time on occasion. The latency sensitive part, the audio playback, can be performed using traditional device drivers and queues even on computers a thousand times slower than anything that runs Vista.
The only computationally intensive processes introduced by Vista that's latency-sensitive are the encryption and decryption operations in the trusted audio path. As you say, this is most likely content protection showing its igly face.
You see, they couldn't stop people from cracking DRM and copying music. And they couldn't stop people from going online and sharing their music. But, Billy has one last ace up his sleave: You can't do both at the same time! There! Ha!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Microsoft states that 'some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not'"
If it was expected...then why didn't you fix the 'some of it' that you were expecting...before it happened?
Thats quite an odd comment for them to make...
So does this affect all Windows media players (e.g. WinAmp), or just WMP? Could be a great argument to jump ship to non-MS software.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It is funny. Microsoft has been around long enough that you know the old saying. Just never, and I mean never buy in pre-SP1 as your are in effect a beta-tester. It might even take 2-3 years or more before it gets as stable as XP is today. And drivers for the stuff you might have bought 6 months ago, good luck.
That is why I bought my last PC at a discount, XP with a free mail in rebate for the Vista. Licensed for when MS gets it together but not going to run it now. I wish I had bought 3. I have two relatives wanting XP and trying to drag me down the Vista hole.
I figure the first vendor of PCs to ask the user on boot, "Shall this be XP or Vista?" will enjoy a nice bump in sales. Even more if it said "Will this be XP, Vista, Solaris 86/64 or Linux?"
File transfer to/from a Samba system while streaming music from teh same Samba share. no drop in performance.
It is a 90% drop. The network bandwidth drops to 10% of what it should be. From what I recall reading about this last week, I thought it only became apparent with a GIGABIT ethernet NIC. All of these posts discussing no effects with mp3 players and 10/100 cards have missed the mark. A 10/100 card running at 100 megabits has 10% of the network bandwidth of a gigabit nic. Nonetheless, MS Windows sucks and this is just another fine example.
Nice theory, but flawed.
ME was released 2 years after '98. It wasn't announced with 10% of the media hype that Vista was announce with. It also wasn't the default for all future OEM deals.
I'm certain a company the size of MS pays a few people to think about the big picture. I'm likewise sure the big picture right now isn't "great move", but more like "how do we get out of this mess?".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Most IT peeps I know would be fired for writing and putting into production an app that hogged hardware resources.
They are either incompetent, or it was on purpose and there is a reason.
What I have seen though is one of my machines absolutley insists on connecting as if it were on a public network everytime I restart it. In short you can do little or nothing until you change it back to private, since Vista immediately circles the wagons and refuses to let anything work because it's scary to be out in public. It has been driving me nuts, I can't find any setting that nixes this behavior.
I have officially stopped complaining or worrying about MS, their code their product or anything else they produce or support. If people think that they're getting a fair shake from Redmond, at this point, no amount contraindication is going to make any difference. My only activism will be to simply work around them.
I run a gaggle of XP machines at home (and one Win95 machine) and this will be the last turn of the MS OS crank for each of them. By the time they are ready for a refresh in the next 2-3 years I will be replacing them with either Freespire or Ubuntu.
You are of course free to do whatever you like. Any comments back to me telling me I'm misinformed, stupid, wrong or silly will be ignored. I no longer care or am interested in what anyone else on the planet has to say about this. Thank you.
Linux has struggled for years to have a scheduler that does NOT skip audios when CPU hog processes are running. And it's still not there.
Windows puts much more emphasis on the desktop and audio playback has been much smoother. This comes at a cost, of course, as the article says. This is a simple trade-off between interactivity (for desktop) and throughput (for server).
But the throughput is only mostly affected if you actually are fully using the CPU and network bandwidth resources. For most people it is not the case (especially for the slow Internet). But if you are transferring huge data in a LAN, this will show up.
Of course the impact may be not necessarily so big, but by design I don't think it's wrong. It's just a trade off.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702
"We are not at liberty to document the additional monitoring and DRM controls that have been imposed upon us by the United States Government and the RIAA/MPAA, and we cannot at this time, reverse these controls, without impacting our financial bottom line.
Every play of an mp3 file is digitally signed, tested, and transmitted upstream to Microsoft's servers for review and analysis by the proper authorities.
This policy is not subject to change at this time.
Thank you for supporting Microsoft."
... since I was able to play MP3 audio files with zero slowdown on a 486 system with a properly built (read: built specifically for the 486) mpg123 binary.
I could even encode such audio from an outside source without any visible impact on the system. That was... oh, hell, I don't remember what *year* that was, but it was way before Windows Vista.
If a 486 could do the work and not flinch, what in the world could Vista be doing that is so detrimental to system performance, given that we know that both tasks can be done without any real major impact on the CPU? Maybe they decided to implement the antithesis of CFS...
M$ screws over the people who give them money (customers), to please people who don't give them any money. (Hollywood). Why ? The only thing I can think of is that they want to use content to lock people into using a M$ OS. Problem is that every content protection scheme has been broken. All of them. So there is no way you can lock people out of Linux with just content protection alone. I don't believe they will use the DMCA against end users for just watching a DVD either, so the question is, What the hell are they thinking ? Because they are up to something. You don't piss off all the people who give you money for people who don't for no reason.
Gosh if you are going to use an open standard audio file, you can't be very a very important user. So, who cares if your network performance sucks... after all, M$ sold the OS to the OEM, and you only agreed to the EULA.
Vista audio problems were known prior to rollout. Pops, hissing... they probably heard applause! LOL
They must think people will be happy as long as it comes from such a big powerful wonderful company.
Remember, this was supposed to be an UPGRADE. Honestly, it is just terrible. Vista on a laptop is simply awful. These were brand new HP laptops with 2GB of RAM.
Vista offers nothing. It is an utter waste of time to attempt an upgrade at this time. With Vista and IE7, the shine is definitely off of MS. There is nothing in the MS product roadmap that is even remotely interesting to me at this point.
MS competitors have never had a better time to take advantage of MS market position than they do now. The hole is wide open.
So why is it that Win XP never had this problem on slower hardware? Nor Win2K, ME, 98SE, 98, 95...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's not totally broken, your problem about slow speeds when copying files over network drives is due to a "feature" of vista that compresses the files before transfer. Unless you have a ridiculously fast computer on a ridiculously slow connection, this is obviously a bad idea but for some reason Microsoft enabled it by default. Go look up how to disable "Remote Differential Compression".
What are you saying? Can't you see it's excellent backward compatibility? It plays Mp3 like you were on your old 386! How more backward can that be?
It is obvious you don't work in this industry if you say things like that. Fired for writing code that hogged processor resources? What sort of parallel universe do you inhabit? Rarely are programmers fired for making egregious mistakes.
So I ran my own test.
I transferred a 3.5 gigabyte file from my Ubuntu Fawn laptop to my Vista Ultimate workstation. Both are dual-core Intel processors; the Ubuntu laptop is a T5600 @ 1.83ghz, and the Vista workstation is an e6600 @ 2.4ghz. They are connected through a normal Belkin with a 100mbit ports.
(Amusingly, the file in question was a Vista Ultimate ISO.)
While the transfer took place I opened Vista's task manager and looked at the network utilization graph. Steady at 38% with almost no deviation. I let that go for a minute.
Then I played an mp3.
Immediately the utilization went to 27% and held steady. As soon as I stopped the mp3, it shot back up to 38%.
I did this all with WMP at first, thinking that'd be it. To double-check I ran my usual player, Winamp, with the exact same results.
Here is a screenshot of the network graph. Every single one of those dips you see was me playing an mp3. Disgusting!
Thinking that just maybe the problem was disk usage, I did two things. First, I forced a defrag on Vista while the transfer was underway. Network utilization was unaffected. Next, I tried streaming music from my own darkwave station (and then shamelessly plugged in on slashdot). Network obligingly dropped to 27% even though streaming shouldn't use the disk.
I'm convinced. This is a seriously messed up issue and I hope to whatever diety that Microsoft rectifies it quickly.
For the record, Vista has managed to annoy me a lot less than any previous incarnation of Windows, at least in userland, once I turned off the UAC crap. And I like some of the little extras that it does. But from a technical and administrative standpoint, this is highly obnoxious, and I'm pretty appalled.
I do have to say, though, that until I went out of my way to test this, I had never noticed the difference, and I'm a technical guy. The average user would probably never notice the difference under any circumstances. That does not excuse this type of idiocy, but it may explain why MS chose to do this. Just a guess.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
None of the explanations in question have been voiced by Microsoft in an official channel. We have a ZDNet blogger selectively quoting an alleged email he got from some unnamed person at Microsoft.
I'm ready to believe that the ZDNet blogger did get an email with those quotes from somebody at Microsoft, and that he's not distorting the content, but I'm far less ready to believe that this email represents Microsoft's official take on it. For all we know, it's a product manager making stuff up or misinterpreting the answer he got from an engineer they asked; they could be releasing information without the due cautions or without going through the correct channels; etc.
Predictions:
Are you adequate?
"...this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3."
That's funny, the last time I remember any OS taking any significant hit to play an MP3 I was running on a 166 mhz Pentium II.
I suppose this explains why MS has been so reticent to start afresh with the codebase until now. Even basic things are buggy and it's costing the reputation of the latest roll-out. Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
This has been the case for every "new" M$ OS ever. When talking to their investors, they are proud to say they never enter a market that's not "mature" and always do so by purchasing someone else's "killer" code for pennies on the dollar. The only difference is that the problems have added up and that investors have quit funding Windoze startups so M$ no longer has anyone to buy. This is why exploits invariably encompass every version of Winblows listed by those who publish them. It's also part of the reason Vista has taken so long to roll out. Every "new" release of Winblows is promissed to have rewritten code from the ground up and all the best features of every rival without any of the problems. As the world outside of M$ is much larger than M$ itself, their boasting is clearly impossible. If reason alone is not good enough, just look back at all of the things promissed but not delivered for every previous version of Windows. I'm not sure they have delivered on all the promisses made for Win95 yet but I am sure their infamous "backward compatibility" is from never writting much new code.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Although that is informative, that guy claims (and shows) a 50% drop in network speed. That's something different entirely from the 85-90% drop claimed by half of Slashdot. So if anything, it proves that the performance drop is much less severe in some (most/all/typical?) situations. The question remains: where is the data backing up your claims of 90% drops?
Also, I'm not sure if I'm interpreting those screenshots correctly (I don't use Windows so I'm not too familiar with its monitoring tools) but if 100% in that graph corresponds to 1 Gb/s transfer speed, then the speed drops from 32 megabyte to a still very respectable 16 megabyte per second. People seem to suggest that networking grinds to a halt when playing audio, but although this drop is very significant, it by no means renders your network connection unusably slow. In fact, it's still pretty damn fast.
'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
Must be a bug in their design process but it could be something to do with the company structure. I suspect it comes from the marketing interface which is horribly broken. The customer value in gates.h is still pointing to RIAA and MPAA rather than user.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I listen to MP3s and WMVs all day while I compile and bang away at local and remote copies of SQL Server. Azerus seems to run fine in the background. I really haven't noticed anything. Not saying its not there, just hasn't been noticeable. Is there some easy way to recreate this effect?
Absolute bullshit. Microsoft are right here. They've admitted there's a bug in it - something is definitely wrong if the re-prioritizing of tasks is causing that much of a performance hit.
But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design. Sometimes it is built directly into hardware - you dedicate fewer, faster lines to audio and slower and buffered to the networking. When audio skips you are FUCKED. When network traffic stalls, TCP - and in fact UDP and most other protocols layered in some fashion over Ethernet or ATM - is actually designed to handle it by retransmission.
A 90% drop is ridiculously high, but it IS keeping your audio system fed with data reliably. Perhaps it just needs some extreme fine-tuning. It's certainly the case that a PCI Express audio card because of the high overhead would not be fed data fast enough (PCI Express is high bandwidth but not low-latency) if a PCI Express networking device was pushing data around. We've had this stuff before on Creative cards, where the PCI latency and bus mastering has been tweaked such that the PCI chipset holds the bus for "far too long" causing problems with the rest of the system. But in the end there are not that many TRULY elegant ways of doing it.
Every system bus is contended at some point, and if the contention shows VISIBLE or AUDIBLE artifacts, then the user will be pissed off. That means, display corruption, legobricking of MPEG data, audio skipping or looping, you cannot have this on a high quality multimedia system, however, 100mbit/s transfer rate really is just fine when it comes down to it. Not perfect considering you paid for something 10x faster, but still, not all that bad for multimedia performance.
It doesn't matter if it's still usable. What matters here is that doing something as simple as listening to music has been shown to decrease the network performance of a computer. Completely unacceptable.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
gad_zuki quotes the M$ party line:
In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight.
Which is contradicted by the entire conversation. People have noticed that 90% performance drop on ordinary networks, not some fancy gigabit thing most people do not have yet.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
.. And I had one of those. Then I was so pleased to later upgrade to a then-3-yr-old Win2000 box that ran at (gasp) 800 mhz! Look! It plays music!
So I also agree, something is seriously whacked if their high end flagship can't play music.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
these kind of interactions are familiar to me..
i can't print an A3 sized pictures (USB printer) without disabling ethernet,
and that's win xp.
if only i could use the epson r2400 in linux with full color management
Also, I'm not sure if I'm interpreting those screenshots correctly (I don't use Windows so I'm not too familiar with its monitoring tools) but if 100% in that graph corresponds to 1 Gb/s transfer speed, then the speed drops from 32 megabyte to a still very respectable 16 megabyte per second. People seem to suggest that networking grinds to a halt when playing audio, but although this drop is very significant, it by no means renders your network connection unusably slow. In fact, it's still pretty damn fast.
I'm sorry, but you aren't making any sense whatsoever. If I buy a racecar that I use on Sundays at the track, and turning on the radio decreases it's top speed from 200mph down to 100mph, is that OK because that is "still pretty damn fast"? If I book a flight that should take 10 hours but whenever the stewardess serves food or beverages, it decreases the plane speed so that the flight takes 20 hours instead, travelling at only 300mph, is that ok because it is "still pretty damn fast"?
If I am running an internal network, where data transfer speeds are critical to the work I am doing and playing MP3s decreases that speed by 50% (assuming it is the 50% you are claiming the article says and not 85-90%) is that ok because it is "still pretty damn fast"?
I have been playing MP3s on systems as old as 486's (which used a whopping 10% CPU - with NO network degradation) - there is NO load on today's system when playing an MP3 - except through poor design - or worse yet, intent - so there is no reason why network speeds should drop AT ALL - much less 50%, 85%, 90% or whatever. As others have noted in other threads on /. and elsewhere, such bottlenecks of late all seem to be due to DRM related issues in Vista... I wouldnt doubt a similar issue is the cause here - and the reason why Microsoft is (properly for once) stating that some of this issue is actually due to design.
The fact is, on today's multi GHz, multi-core systems, a 10% drop in network performance would be outrageous for something as simple as playing an MP3 or other audio stream... 50% is ludicrous... and I can't even think of a word to describe what an 85-90% drop would constitute.
Yes, when it comes to the Internet world, even a 90% drop in network performance on a gigabit network card doesnt really mean anything for most people - such an attitude misses many still valid points and issues, such as there are numerous users who don't have that Internet bottleneck to make such slowed down connection speeds a moot point (college students for one, businesses with dedicated high speed lines for another) - there are also users of every sort who have home networks set up who WILL see the degradation in speed since they are not limited by their Internet Connection Speed (businesses, home users, gamers doing LAN parties, you name it) - and most importantly, there is no VALID technical reason why playing any audio stream should degrade network performance on today's hardware.
That last point brings up the final issue. It really does not matter if MS claims there are valid design reasons or valid technical reasons for the drop in network performance (whether 10%, 50%, 85%, 90%, whatever) - because as far as the features end users want, there is NOT - and the only "features" I can think of that would cause this are DRM related technologies so liberally sprinkled all over Vista. Any other reason is quite simply poor coding and design... and as MS didnt write, and has barely changed any of the networking stuff in Windows in quite some time, I think it is more of an issue of "features" that no one wants, may be illegal (under the fair use doctrine) and should never have been dumped into Vista to begin with.
People seem to suggest that networking grinds to a halt when playing audio, but although this drop is very significant, it by no means renders your network connection unusably slow. In fact, it's still prett
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I personally get very tired of hearing "OMG! F*ck you M$ - I'm going to Linux!" with every reported bug that gets plastered all over this site, like some sort of victory parade. It's sad.
It's a bug. There'll be others. It'll be fixed though, so for all the people that enjoy listening to music in WMP while maxing network bandwidth, I'm afraid you've got a painful wait in store.
throw new NoSignatureException();
they only check the legality of each whole and half note, but not the quarter notes.
I used to play MP3's on a 486DX-40. Granted there was some "chop" if I opened or closed windows while it was playing, but a 90% drop in networking performance?..sorry MS, I'm not buying it. My XP machine doesn't suffer network hits when playing ANY kind of media. My 2000 machine doesn't suffer any problems with the same. My Linux box CERTAINLY doesn't. I wish I knew why a corporation would tell an outright lie, when they know they're going to be found out.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
When are you going to learn...So why is it that Win XP never had this problem on slower hardware? Nor Win2K, ME, 98SE, 98, 95...
It is so much more important to sound authoritative than it is to actually BE authoritative.
If you fuck with the formula the whole goddamned system from your house to the Whitehouse falls appart. You get mired down in truth, facts. It is a disgusting mess.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The only windows system I currently have is an AMD dual-core laptop dual booting Linux. I first noticed the slow network speeds while transferring files to my main desktop linux system from vista on the laptop. If it had been 90% of the network speeds that I get from linux (on the same hardware) it wouldn't have been very noticeable and it wouldn't have been worth the trouble to track down the problem. I didn't keep detailed notes, but it was about 12% of the speed for transferring large files, either direction. I'm not the one that figured out the audio connection though.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Look, I am not saying there is no bugs, I am just saying what Microsoft said makes sense that it's by design, and some of the behavior is expected, while others NOT.
If you follow Linux scheduler development, you'll often see that it goes through many many iterations (what's the current version for CFS? 20? 30?). Often a change to address one area of performance problems causes a regression in another. Do we then say that CFS is wrong by design?
Scheduler is not rocket sicnece, but careful tuning and extensive testing are needed. I'd rather this be a TECHNICAL thread instead of just mindless bashing from people without a single clue about what it is actually about.
The Amiga 600 could load a game from FLOPPY disk (not hard disk!) while playing a game or demo at the same time without a drop in frame or sound...and that was 20 years ago.
It's a shame, but PC architecture, no matter how advanced the individual components are, is still not the proper architecture for multimedia...it makes you think about what progress is, isn't it?
Because the problem was not in the design of any of those.
DRM is a relatively new technology and is bound to cause problems. Especially when you want the OS to check it's every damn operation for dealing with protected content.
MS acknowledged (in roundabout terms) that this is a bug. They are downplaying the severity just as any profit-minded corporation does, what did you expect them to say.. OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE WE LET THAT ONE SLIDE BY. I would guess they're working on some sort of patch/solution/whatnot.
While I certainly don't agree or endorse every tactic by Microsoft and the like.. don't take too much credit that the slashdot crowd had anything to do with bringing this issue to light and "Microsoft took notice".
How fast was your LAN connection in '95? What media were you playing at work?
Amen, brother evil. Preach it man.
My suspicion is:
s /cableguy/cg0905.mspx
1 3073
s /2007/02/VistaKernel/
A) Networking stack in Vista is rewritten, for example, IPv6 is native, IPv4 is optional.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/column
B) Audio stack is re-written, allowing for the new mixer, where each app has its own volume control (and some DRM, but that's not relevent to this issue)
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=7
C) the Thread scheduler is changed in Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issue
D) Appears to only affect Gigabit and above networking.
item C is possibly the key to this bug, I'm sure the Networking people did lots of perfomance testing, and so did the Multimedia people, as well as the Kernel folks... But, perhaps the full ramifications of the Thread Scheduler could not have been tested in every other combination.
The basic problem is that Multimedia playback changes the thread scheduler, which affects EVERYTHING. it could have been "Inkjet Printing while playing audio fails", "cannot hot-swap IDE drives while playing audio", "an open audio application blocks hibernate if brand XYZ laptops"... by chance, gigabit networking performace was affected, not because of any direct link.
Whats needed is for all performance or reliability minded software to be tested both normally, and while playing music in the background (or just with a program that turns on MMCSS, and then does nothing else). Just like when running under a debugger, multi-core machine, virtual machine, etc. different timing, thread deadlock, and race conditions may be found.
You just beat my sig up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Win2K is probably the best product M$ has produced to date. DRM has pushed them downhill ever since. And not that their peak was very high - more like a little hill.
And please note that you missed the part that M$ is saying it's the extent of the slowdown that caught them by surprise. That means they knew in advance that playing MP3s slowed down network performance.
For once, "It ain't a bug, it's a feature" is actually TRUE.
M$ hid this feature because it's one damn near all users would think is stupid. Note that I didn't call them "customers", because the users of M$ crap aren't customers - M$'s customers are groups like RIAA and MPAA. And it's those groups that want DRM to defend their outdated business model, and M$ is only too happy to ally themselves with them just because M$ sees it as a way to make a buck and lock out competitors.
In other news, Netcast announces 10% of reduction for worldwide P2P traffic* since the release of Vista.
* from Vista machines
The summary says "Apparently [Microsoft] believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight'". But here's what the article actually says:
"In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
If the alternative to Microsoft FUD is Anti-Microsoft FUD, I'm not sure we're much better off.
I have just one thing to say:
hahahahahahahahahaah
that is all.
Whenever I want to play an mp3, I just turn my gigabit NIC up to eleven.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I always assumed I was the only one with the problem because nobody else seemed to know what I was talking about. All of my posts were generally met with either "You're an idiot, your hard drives can't achieve gigabit speeds" (actually, they come damn close -- thanks RAID0) or "Buy a new network card."
Whenever I have Media Center or WMP open (not even playing anything), my gigabit network speed drops to ~10% -- 100baseT speed. Close Media Center, and it jumps to full speed, sometimes. But not always. Hopefully they fix this, because the only time I really care about gigabit speeds is when I'm transferring large files to my HTPC, which generally has Media Center open all the time. So I either have to go manually close it, or do a remote desktop connection which closes Media Center automatically. In either case I have to manually restart it. None of that is particularly onerous, but it's an absurd requirement, intended or not.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"OMG nobody is buying Vista. MS is dead. This is the year of linux. etc. etc." You idiots sound like broken records that nobody will hit forever. Meanwhile, Vista sells 60 million+ in 6 months. Ya, I'm sure ol' billy is quaking in his boots because of the idiots that write bot like messages on slashdot all day. Get a life. Never mind, kill yourself, you'd just waste a life.
No, they're three descriptions of the same OS in decreasing order of product experience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"The hole is wide open."
Link, please?
...will repair my bones, but words will never help me, M$.
bogged down my system even more.
No, I don't want WinVista.
And stop resetting my defaults and adding autoload cruft with every update - you wonder why we hate you?
At this rate I'm getting a Mac (if not Linux) for my next computer.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"This is Vista content protection backfiring, plain and simple."
Actually, I rather think that it's not backfiring at all, but rather working exactly as written. The issue is that we have not yet figured out ourselves exactly which hole they are plugging.
Never had any glitching in 2K or XP, network load or not. But in Vista I did, and that without much system load at all. These days I'm using Solaris, whose scheduler is sure as hell not optimized for anything media related, and it doesn't glitching either. So yeah, pretty nice working feature.
If you're listening to mp3s and trying to use your network at the same time, you must
be illegally downloading music right. I mean, what else could you be using your network for?
I remember learning to make basic console applications on VC++ once upon a time years ago. I can't even remember how many of the really basic things (like, say, cin) were somehow broken. At one point, I found a whole page worth of workarounds online and applied those fixes, because half the stuff in their std namespace wasn't.
This laptop I am working on now ($5k USD class laptop) came delivered with Vista. Let me give a few exmaples of what I had to deal with to make the issues clear.
A quick example of this would be how I needed to copy high-bitrate media-files (HDTV, 20mbps) locally before I could play them in Vista. On GigE freakin' LAN.
Copying 4GB+ virtual machines, again on GigE LAN could take better parts of a day. Checking the performance monitor, I could see that I had 10mbps actual data-transfer. I'm not kidding here. IO was beyond piss poor.
This is something I've never had issues with in any other OS. I'm not calling it unacceptable. I'm saying it's fucking crap.
In short: There were a few improvements I honestly liked in Vista (apart from the eyecandy), and those were really nice improvements, but honestly...
All the issues I had in Vista which I assumed any modern OS has tackled years ago, with regards to performance, usability and all that were simply too much for me to handle. I'm back at XP SP2 and I feel like that's the biggest hardware upgrade I have ever done.
For those interested in the technical aspects of this, I would wrote a simple, hypothetical article on the aspects of OS complexity and performance from a developers point of view on the tight Kernel-DRM coupling some time back.
That, however, is nothing compared to what this guy did.
Reading these it's pretty obvious why Vista has exactly the issues it has, and why MS sucking up to the entertainment industry probably is the worst business move they have ever made.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
You just gotta love them and their boyish pranks.
The part about network/multimedia was amusing. The problem with multimedia is all the DRM that's all over the OS.
I have a theory, & you or others who wish to try to "experiment" with it, can try:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr
Under there, is a NEW value (DWORD datatype) called "WriteWatch" that used to not be present in the OS I use afaik, until a service pack or hotfix introduced it...
(& it is a BOOLEAN 0/1-True/False switch based one... it is by default, set to 1... try it @ zero instead, & see what happens!)
If this works? It'd be pretty cool... the only reason I put it up, is that it has NO documentation online for what it does, EXACTLY, so this is just a "shot in the dark/taking a stab/wild guess" from me, but since it is undocumented? It may very well be the thing controlling this behaviour, when it sees data flowing through that is of multimedia types... all to intentionally "collar" illegal filesharing is my guess.
APK
P.S.=> There is NO documentation on it, so I am assuming THIS may be the "key entry" to alter in this respect... it's ALL about the DRM in VISTA imo, as far as Mr. Ballmer is concerned (big mistake, as it pisses off customers imo @ least).
Just like the Daleks in this quote below, replace "Genesis Ark" with "DRM" instead, & get the MS viewpoint from their top mgt. being put upon they, & yes, customers too:
"The Genesis Ark must be protected @ all costs" - Dalek, from Dr. Who episode "DOOMSDAY"... apk
My question is, besides Linux, who's in a position to take it? Sure, Nintendo is beating the pants off MS in the gaming arena... But OpenOffice hasn't made much headway... Firefox has done OK but I think we all would've liked to see more growth... So...how does one usurp the OS market? Is Linux ready?
While composing this message I am playing an mp3 and downloading a large file on a Mandriva 2007.1 (cooker) Linux machine. I chose the latest version of the linux kernel to download and the song "Victim of Changes" by Judas Priest for the sake of irony. Gkrellm shows that my Intel Core Duo shows about 3-9% usage per core (and Gkrellm is a GUI based monitoring tool so there is constant graphics card writes going on as well), with a peak of 45% for the first core only when I am typing and the hard disk is being written to at the same time. So I am successfully using SMP and all of these interrupts are being handled and the audio is perfectly clean. It is absurd that anyone would try to write the Vista behavior off as expected, acceptable, or (especially) necessary. This is by design according to the M$ shill! At least he admits that they deliberately squander hardware resources and reduce performance on their systems.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No it bloody isn't. As I stated in a comment the first time this story cropped up, I have a 600MHz G3 iBook that gives me 100% network speed while it's playing an MP3 across the local wireless network from another machine AND displaying a fairly graphics intensive visualizer. If a 6-year old machine can do this without breaking a sweat, why can't a new PC with a 2GHz+ processor and a much better graphics system do it? Clearly something is terribly broken in Vista, and no amount of spin can put a positive gloss on that. I don't wish to troll, but if Apple can do it, Microsoft at several times its size has no excuse.
Excuse me???
MP3 decoding doesn't even register as a blip on modern CPUs.
No sig today...
There shouldn't be *any* decrease!
People have been doing simultaneous sound/networking as long as I can remember and this never happened before.
Audio playback shouldn't even register as a tiny blip on a modern CPU (and neither should networking!)
And...there's people with quad core machines who get the problem. How do you explain that?
No sig today...
Hi
I run Vista just fine on my work Thinkpad, I shoved it on that and my home PC as well and they work great.
Since you seem to be making the judgement that "it works badly in two cases that I saw", I can suggest "it works fine in two cases I saw", thus equalling the strength and quality of your study and finding completely opposite results.
I've seen XP run like a dog on some systems. Does that mean XP "offers nothing" and "is an utter waste of time"?
I've seen Linux run like a dog on some systems. Does that mean Linux "offers nothing" and "is an utter waste of time"?
Having said that, Vista needs a lot of work, there's no denying it could be much better than it is (much like XP when it was first released, much like NT4.0 was when it was first released, much like Windows 3.0 when it was first released....)
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
"But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design."
It is, but when you have 2 cores, 4 GB of memory, and loads of spare CPU time, and the last version of the operating system didn't suffer from this problem, it's legitimate to call Microsoft to task.
What is the benefit to the end user of Vista? The behavior is suspicious, considering Microsoft had 1/2 a decade to work on this thing.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
a drop in network performance to play an MP3?
My XP system doesn't do that.
I could setup a win98 system that wouldn't do that.
I could even setup a win2k system that wouldn't do that.
Why should I upgrade to an OS which has worse performance?
It's DRM. The performance drops are because of DRM. It's built into Vista.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Incidentally, our builds which used to take these developers 5 minutes to perform on Vista are taking a little over 2 on XP now. Photoshop no longer crashes. They are running at WAY under 500MB RAM allocated, and their laptops are much faster.
Please, from a business standpoint, identify why I should continue to endure this crap, shell out money for ridiculous amounts of RAM, and handicap a brand new Santa Rosa Intel Dual Core machine to the point it performs like a P4?
It is a "waste of time" because the glaringly-obvious better solution is Windows XP for Windows users.
Err, if you am running an internal network, where data transfer speeds are critical to the work you am doing, why the hell are you playing MP3s on it (i.e. you shouldn't have a radio in your race car)? Go buy yourself an iPod :-).
OK, what's with the selective quoting of the Microsoft response? The article header tries mightily to make it seem like Microsoft thinks this problem is not much of a problem. It also tries to imply this is happening to everyone, all the time, and Microsoft could care less.
However, reading the actual Microsoft response gives a completely different take on things. Microsoft realizes that this behavior, while having good intentions, is causing issues. Far from being some unfounded bug, there is a real purpose behind why the slowdown is occurring, namely a focus of multimedia scheduling performance trumping all. They are going to address these issues, not ignore them, but you wouldn't know it from the article teaser.
I have Vista on one of my PC's. I find it slower and more or less undesirable compared to Windows XP64 on my other boxen. It's there largely for me to get familiar with, as we're all undoubtedly going to be dealing with it soon and for a long time to come. You may be able to avoid Windows in your personal computing, but you'd have to live in a tiny bubble indeed to go through a work day without interacting with a co-worker, client, or customer who isn't on a Microsoft product of some sort.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Good "conspiracy theory". Ever heard of Singularity? Whole OS written in C, Assembler and Managed .NET. They've end-of-lifed FoxPro and VB6, I'm sure that ASP will dying. They've started moving big chunks of Office 2007 to .NET so it's probably just a matter of a few years before they're ready to dump everything into managed code and start rolling out Singularity (Windows 2010?).
You're really not that far off, people have been "waiting" for Vista, but this is really a throwaway OS, nobody is using it and it's not like business is "clamoring" for even this version. Heck many Enterprises have just finish rolling out XP. The new WPF and WCF will surely be functional under Singularity, and Enterprises are just now moving to Managed Code applications (check out the market for ".NET developers"). MS won't die away if this Vista "fails", so we're probably all looking at a Managed Code future in 2010 or 2011 :)
I am running a 3 year old G5 tower that has all the eye candy of Vista and is playing MP3s while using the network at 100%, same thing running Linux on an even more ancient P4 notebook and Ubuntu 7.04. Hell even my PIII box with XP sp2 has no problem doing this. M.S. has no excuses for this kind of screwup in 2007.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Now we have Micro$oft pulling the same crap. Does it ever end?
If you think one should be self reliant, virtuous and responsible, I'm sorry, but you're a Conservative.
Same goes for Windows Server 2008 (beta 2 build 6001).
I am testing Windows Server 2008, Datacenter Edition and there are occuring the same problems as in vista so this server os really SUX.
Contending that degraded network performance is anything but an act of utter incompetence (with or without malice) can be resolved by running Vista in a virtual machine under OS/X.
I tried it using the latest rev of Parallel's product. The results? Network performance degrades on the Vista VM but **not** on the host operating system, OS/X. This remains true even when concurrently playing the same MP3 file under Vista (VM) and OS/X (host). This test was performed on a 2GHz MacBook with 2GB RAM running OS/X rev. 10.4.10.
If you run the same test, but substitute XP for Vista, then network performance remains virtually intact while concurrently playing an MP3 file on the host OS and on the VM.
Man, I too don't like when they're offending my company, but the man was talking about a Java dev machine. I have been a Java dev before MS for 5-6 years and I can tell you, all of those Java dev tools run fine on Linux. Sadly he has a point - most disk i/o performance problems were fixed only last month in a patch. Can't blame him for removing the oem-supplied junk-ridden version.
so claiming the 'wrong' statistic of a 90% dropoff is different to the statistic of 'half of slashdot' how? if you are going to cry foul about abuse of statistics, don't do it yourself.
The obvious answer, and the best one found in the articles, is this is an issue with priority.
I can drop my file transfer ability by using my USB TV-Tuner that installs itself as above average priority.
In tryin to give better audio quality it's effecting other areas of the system.
Wow! Yet ever other post is a stupid conspiracy piece of crap.
Get a freaking clue before you post. And if you're still wondering why it's a Vista issue and not a XP issue at this point call you grandma for tech support instead of the other way around because you're not qualified to think apparently.
Hmmm... lets say I do graphics all day, and archive the raw data to our file server (or perhaps even store the data there)... instead of wasting the power of my iPod's battery (assuming I have one) or needing a dock with speakers... why can't I just play MP3s from my computer while I am working? And when I do, why should I wait 3 minutes (or 5 minutes) for a file transfer that should take 1.5 minutes?
Data transfer speeds aren't always critical to wanting to reach maximum transfer rates (as in my example). Nonetheless, you are still missing the point. There is no reason for the network degradation (under these circumstances) - regardless of what MS claims. Period. End of story.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
_You_ never had the problem.
Some network drivers had DPCs that took too long to run, leading to choppy playback while the network took more time than it should have.
You may have noticed that Windows machines do not have the luxury of bug free device drivers. The majority of bluescreens since NT4 have been caused by 3rd party kernel-mode code (video drivers, IFSs, etc). The push to go user-mode on as much of the 3rd party code as possible isn't accidental.
My understanding is that in Vista, this particular tradeoff was made to attempt to avoid something everyone would notice (a skip during audio playback) for something very few people would notice (slightly reduced network performance while listening to music).
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Doesn't matter? Are you stupid? No system is giving 100% to audio most of the time. If a system made it so my audio playback was as close to perfect as could be without interfering with other functions, I'd love that. They all try but no one gets it 100%. XP had less preference on audio, and I could tell the difference in quality when my CPU was getting taxed on other things.
You may not like the priority. But at least have a clue what your talking about.
Every article about MS get tagged with this so it is completely meaningless now as a tag.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
So does this mean if Windows XP gets another sevice pack, we can be assured of this feature as well :)
This is the market opportunity they've been waiting for. Put tape in.. click.. play. It's better quality than VHS you know.
So what you're saying is that anecdotally, vista works on 50% of machines out there? How wonderful!! Where's my wallet? 'sif
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
they fix the network graph so it doesn't show these silly drops
You didn't expect to give up your freedoms to get improved performance did you? Features like the inability to play certain music without rhyme or reason don't come for free you know. If you want (ugh!) freedom you should go to something like (ick) Linux.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Ah, yes. The company that managed to switch CPU archs without a huge amount of breakage. Twice. I'm sorry, I fail to see your point here..
Please, from a business standpoint, identify why I should continue to endure this crap, shell out money for ridiculous amounts of RAM, and handicap a brand new Santa Rosa Intel Dual Core machine to the point it performs like a P4?
Ohh, so your major gripe with Vista is that, much like every other OS predecessor in both *nix, Mac and Windows space, it requires more resources than previous incarnations? Welcome to the age of integrated circuits, the 1940's miss you already.
You install an O/S that's not even service packed yet from MS, knowing full well the overhead is much higher than previous OS's, then you have the gall to complain the performance isn't higher on the same spec hardware? Well done, what's it like being a rocket scientist?
If you want more performance than even XP, try installing Windows 95 on that shiny new hardware. By your standards, it's an upgrade because the OS has lower overheads.
still waiting for what the Vista "upgrade" gives me...
Time and time again I talk to people that hate windows but don't even know that alternatives exist at all... or my favorite: the people that heard (through some FUD or another) that "Linux doesn't support laptop hardware well". Then I give them an Ubuntu CD and they boot into a liveCD environment that supports their video, audio, wireless, ethernet, etc. out of the box. Sounds like someone's been lying.
XP can't even do that. They spend ages installing driver 1, reboot,install driver 2, reboot...
Then let's talk about getting Windows up to date. Download some updates, reboot, download others, reboot, download others, reboot, etc. Let's not even mention service packs if you have a pre SP1 or SP1 CD... those just take FOREVER and are quite annoying and complex to get working for an end user.
The alternative? Clicking "reload", "upgrade","apply" in synaptic. It happens ONCE, all the updates are automatically downloaded and applied for every program on your system as well as the core OS, and you reboot once. Once. Might I re-enforce there's no searching for where to download installers, etc. I'd also like to re-enforce that EVERY program, not just your kernel or shell (explorer.exe) gets updated. Your office suite, your image editor, everything. Oh, and no activation or WGA.
Most of the FUD around Microsoft is flat out lies and most of the hype behind Linux is also lies from the same people spreading anti Microsoft shit all over the Internet and the forums. So you complain that Linux has only grassroots - read: user - support and advertising. How was that hard to figure out? THATS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PRODUCT IS FREE. That does not make it lies. Actually, what annoys me most is how people like you believe a lie just because it was paid for by a big company like Microsoft.
We have a term for people like you where I come from.
Idiots.
This is why professional musicians wouldn't be seen dead using Vista or XP. I was at a music festival this weekend and every band that used a laptop (it was a electronic music festival) was using a Macbook Pro.
Microsoft just doesn't care about the end user experience anymore, they compromise productivity in the name of keeping the MPAA/RIAA and large businesses happy.
On a related note, I was just copying a large file (a few GB) from DVD to harddisk, and noticed access to the network became inanely slow. We're talking about a minute for fetching a short list of directories, a process which normally takes under a second.
As soon as the copying from DVD finished, the explorer window with the network volume became responsive again.
I didn't test anything else; in particular, I didn't test whether regular (say, HTTP) network access or regular (non-networked) file I/O were slow. CPU usage was about 3% and memory wasn't reported as full.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While I agree there is something weird going on, I think Microsoft's biggest mistake with Vista has been killing performance for the higher end users while attempting to make the system more usable for lower end users. The reason being is that their lower end users make up an absolutely vast majority of their user base, NOT the technical users (even though we dominate the media outlets).
Look at all of the changes they have made and clearly it is visible:
1. Superfetch - A feature that uses all of your available ram as sort of a paging system for many applications that you run. The net effect of this ability is that switching between applications results in fast access to all of the smaller applications that you load. The side effect to this is that when you use an application that wants to make use of all of your ram or even a larger chunk of it, Windows needs to dump that ram to the hard drive (or usb key). Which then whenever you load an application that continually uses a lot of ram, you end up with HD writes in locations that should not generate them (middle of game loads, etc)
2. Network/Audio IO. Clearly it has always been traditionally a problem where audio and video performance degrades and stutters on one's system as a result of the system doing some of the most useless tasks. Clearly Microsoft decided to set a higher priority to the "perceivable" functions rather than the imperceivable ones such as the networking speed. I would imagine they did this since a vast majority of users (I like that saying) don't actually use their network for sharing files but rather use it to browse the internet. Even in a high bandwidth internet connection 20-30-40-100mbits is not noticeable when all you're doing is browsing a webpage. You're sooner going to run into the speed at which that data can be moved down the line which such small amounts of data being moved.
Microsoft's mistake here was ignoring the power users of their OS in favor of a system that helps their lower end users. Now, there isn't necessarily a problem with that. At least from the marketing standpoint (and those guys, weee, they love to ignore power users). The fact is that these users make up the vast majority of the OS so Microsoft decided to cater a lot of its internal functions to making their experience better. The fact really is that they could care less either way. The only reason most of them even consider their computer slow is after the thing gets ravaged by trojans, spyware, and other nasties. At that point they're just told to upgrade their ram.
However, there are upsides on a technical note to this functionality that I do like that they tried to tackle. For as long as we can remember in the IT industry we've always done the "scheduling a task". Whether you use cron or Task Scheduler, there is a vast majority of usage out of this. Everything from Virus scans, spyware scans, defragmenting, backup jobs, clearing out old and useless files, clearing logs, parsing logs, updating the system, etc. These tasks, these intensive tasks, have almost always had to be scheduled overnight as a result of user perception during the daylight hours. Interestingly enough, you waste say 8 hours of electricity to perform a 1 hour task. What Microsoft attempted to do with Vista is to try and tackle this "scheduling" problem and make it so that the system can do these functions "in real time" without a noticeable perception to the user. You can have virus and spyware scans run in the background without affecting the user input. This opens the freedom to schedule such tasks during the day while someone is on the computer. Freeing up electricity and opening up the door to a far better scheduling flexibility than you used to have.
You can't knock them entirely for trying to tackle that problem.
If there is a drop in Vista (but isn't under XP, or a predecessor OS, especially a Windows OS), why couldn't it simply be poorly-written device drivers? Has anyone been following the raft of complaints about poorly-written device drivers (of almost all sorts) in Vista? But oh noes; let's bash *Microsoft* for making it harder for the IHVs to write device drivers by changing the requirements for said drivers to pass muster (device drivers for Windows Vista, in terms of both x86 and x64, have to pass much more stringent checking before they will pass WHQL certification; in ffact, you can't use uncertified x64 device drivers in Vista x64 at all). *Never mind* that badly-written device drivers have historically been the largest single cause of BSODs in Windows (all versions) each year since Windows 2000 shipped (sources: Microsoft and Gartner Group). *Never mind* that the badly-written or missing device driver has been one of the largest sources of frustration for users of Windows XP (Source: it.slashdot.org; in other words, a large portion of Slashdot's own user base). *Never mind* that, by toughening up the device driver requirements, that Microsoft is simply doing what we, as users, have asked them to do!
There are devices whose drivers *don't* exhibit such horrible misbehavior; once they are found, use them instead. (I have already kicked Lexmark's USB printers, without exception, to the curb for just such horrible driver misbehavior; instead, my Mom, who had been using a Lexmark printer, has followed my own lead and switched to an HP USB printer.) If driver problems make a device unusable, then replace the device with one that works better. (It's called *voting with your wallet*; if you are so willing to castigate *Microsoft* for writing the operating system, why *aren't* you willing to castigate the IHV for writing the horrible device drivers?)
"Having said that, Vista needs a lot of work, there's no denying it could be much better than it is (much like XP when it was first released, much like NT4.0 was when it was first released, much like Windows 3.0 when it was first released....)"
And that's not just a Windows phenomenon. I recall the state of Mac OS X 10.0, which was dog poo. It didn't become great until 10.3. I recall Mac OS 7.0 having lots of problems that 7.1 solved (then 7.5.3 broke, but whatever).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
MP3 decoding doesn't even register as a blip on modern CPUs.
It's still the most computationally intensive LEGITIMATE part of playing back music.
Seriously.
If Vista is doing anything that requires more resources than MP3 decoding, and apparently it is, it's doing something that doesn't belong there.
What makes you think they will deliver that on time or that it will be any better then visa?
evil is as evil does
I don't understand how this bug only appears now. I mean, if vista is crappy enough to reduce your bandwidth by 90-95% when you listent to an mp3, your ping you increase too. I know that ping != bandwidth, but it's a 95% reduction! It cannot be a normal behaviour and in this case, your ping should be affected. And I think that there are tons of online FPS players that are listening to mp3 when playing. And all thos people noticed nothing for month ?
This issue is all about latency. It may not be that significant for basic music playback, but music player apps use the same subsystem as the pro DJ apps, sound editors, etc. Those care a lot about latency for a variety of reasons.
The network stack, by contrast, is focused on throughput. Latency is still significant, but not too much of an issue.
Balancing these requirements means that the host OS may have to make sacrifices in throughput to guarantee acceptably low latencies for audio.
I'm not convinced it _has_ to (Linux manages vaguely OK these days) or that basic audio players need full effort low-latency audio, but it's not as stupid as it seems on face value.
XP has a different scheduler, audio stack, and network stack. Unlike Vista it doesn't try all that hard to guarantee low latency audio (which pro audio folks care about a LOT). There is a throughput/latency tradeoff even across superficially unrelated subsystems on the same hardware, and that could easily explain these observed issues. There's plenty of technical literature out there on low-latency response techniques for providing soft-realtime features in otherwise non-realtime systems (like Vista is doing with audio) that will cover the issues with scheduling, interrupt handling, I/O contention, memory latencies, etc. It's not trivial.
I'm not sure it has to be as bad as it is in Vista (Linux manages vaguely OK in recent versions), nor it is necessarily required for the OS to go hard-out low-latency for basic music playback, but I don't think this issue is as incomprehensible as everyone's making out.
Because Vista removed sound drivers from kernel space, thanks to the crappy job done by sound driver writers.
Ran just fine on my 5yr old 'Dell' (only the case and mobo) when they were out. I never noticed any problems. I used that box as my no.2 desktop and my home's file server/intercom-interfacing stereo. After I got a new box to replace it (this one -made- for Vista) I noticed problems. THREE TIMES it not only ran up all 3 of my secondary fans while pumping music thru the system, it actually killed its own power. Under a lower stress level. (The new box only runs as desktop/whole-house jukebox, the old one still works as a server, just running Gentoo/samba).
I'm not sure quite what the problem was, either the chipset differences of the two machines or program differences from the beta/rc to the final, but somehow the switch really nuked my shared audio performance.
Burn the Land and Boil the Seas, you can't take the sky from me...
What a great article on Vista. I, for one, didn't realize how bad things were in the HDCP sector. Thanks for that! http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
If you do graphics all day, why are you running Vista?
http://www.mhall119.com
You should have got a Macbook ;) wooo flame on
Don't be stupid. I'd rather have my network throttled than hear annoying 'pops' in audio if my CPU can't handle both.
Scary.
Actually, I was thinking almost the exact same thing, only with a more ZOMG MS is EVIL!!! slant.
Depending on how they have this set up it could be a VERY effective deterrent to setting up an undergorund "pirate" internet radio station. The way I've seen these set up is you have a media player outputting to a streamer. Most of the time that media player is also using the sound systems to play the music locally as well. So I can see the "thinking" behind this being "since people are *obviously* going to try and get around DRM by streaming it to other people (who will presumably be streamripping) let's throttle bandwidth so there's not enough bandwidth to transfer an MP3!"
Call it paranoia or what you will, but that would be a very good (and baseless, unfounded, and stupid) reason to cap the network like that. Now, I'm not sure of this, but I thought I heard a story about some big fuss about digital radio and computers - apparently, radio stations thought users would "streamrip" the digital radio, using the convenient tags sent along with the songs to ID the music. So as out-there as my crazy paranoid idea may be, there IS a little bit of precedent about at least some parts of it.
Before you dismiss this as a troll or flamebait, please hear me out. All of our clients are XP on a Win 2K3 domain. We held off for a while before starting to upgrade IE 6 to IE 7. Shortly after the rollout, I started getting a lot of complaints that "the network is slow".
Because some other stuff was going on as well, I didn't think to associate the slowdown with IE 7. Then one day I got a call from someone trying to open up a Visio file in Visio Viewer. So I went to troubleshoot. Much to my surprise, I discovered that Visio Viewer uses IE to open files. In this case, the file never opened. So I tried another one. After 17 seconds, it finally opened.
I noticed this computer had IE 7 on it. So for grins I tried opening the file several more times and timed it each time. It took about 17 seconds every time. So then I rolled IE back to IE 6. Then I tried opening the file. Eight seconds . The file that wouldn't open up before? Now it opened after 12 seconds. It wasn't looking very good for IE 7.
Our engineers were among those complaining about a slow network. So I went to one of their computers and opened up Inventor 11 and timed it. From the double-click to ready status was 2:19. I did this a couple more times for verification and got the same results. IE 7 was installed, so I uninstalled it. I reloaded Inventor. 1:16 .
I repeated this testing on several other engineering computers, and each time, rolling back IE 7 to IE 6 cut the startup time roughly in half. Some applications it knocked down to 1/3 of the time to load.
After ditching IE 7 on all our computers, everyone noticed that "the network" was much faster. Soon thereafter, I noticed problems with WMP 11. Needless to say, I got rid of that piece of @#$%! from our network as well. Seeing that Vista comes with IE 7 and WMP 11, I wager that therein lies the problem--or at least part of it.
As another poster has mentioned, Microsoft decided to rewrite the TCP/IP stack in Vista. When I heard that my first thought was, "That's a mistake." They ditched a fairly mature and stable implementation for one of their own making. Forget the fact that it's Microsoft for a moment, has anyone seen a complete code rewrite/reimplementation come out nice on the first try? Now what about Microsoft? Have they ever come out with some sort of "new" technology and had it work really well the first time around? Is it any wonder, then, that Vista is turning out to be such a turd?
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
So you didn't RTFA and didn't even bother to RTFGP before replying.
Read carefully:
"In most cases the decrease in performance is slight [but] some users are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
Which part of "is clearly a problem that we need to address" can't you understand?
I noticed a spike in my network utilization when I played a song in wmp. It went up to about 10% from 1%. I clicked wmp options/privacy. Disabled everything. Went into my audio properties/advanced and unchecked "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device".
I played about 10 different songs and none of them gave me the networking spike like the first time I played a song with everything enabled. Closed wmp, openned it up again, played a new downloaded metallica song. No more spikes, net runs fine.
Hello, my name's John... and I'm a Vista user. I guess it all started a few months ago when I got this new machine. I was convinced that all the pretty eye candy and the DX10 carrot would be worth it. I was looking forward to playing with the "improved" backup system and defragger, and maybe even the BitLocker stuff. But now I find myself at this meeting... ashamed. *sigh*
Seriously though, I do use Vista and I AM sick of this. Anyone happen to know if hacking the driver would make any difference? Where's google with the awesome lawsuit to fix THIS vista problem? What's that? they only care about the search because it affects them? oh... bummer.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I can't remember the last time I saw a positive comment about a Microsoft product. Seriously.
I was playing media off of my hard drive, as, I believe, was the case here. The network operations were independent of the MP3 playback. And this was with a single processor that was 20X slower, a hard drive that was likely 5X slower, RAM that was easily 3X slower. Trying to say that a faster LAN is what's bogging down machines doesn't hold water since XP isn't so affected.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I see that your definition of "slightly" differs greatly from mine.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Although you have to admit it was devastatingly obvious :p
which is totally what she said
I have been relieved to see that even some non-geeks have rejected Vista.. I hope that things like this disgrace make it into mainstream media and that people take note. I never expected that Microsoft would be able to release such a crappy product (that's really saying something). Seemed like they were heading in the right direction with XP, and that things would only get better. I was resigned to thinking that maybe I should change my opinion of them these days. It's hilarious that Vista sucks so much, but it also has the potential to make me cry if they manage to shove it down the public's throat and it becomes dominant. 50% drop in network speed from playing a sound. It's insane. Especially while the analog hole exists (ie until we all have cyberbrains or live in the Matrix.. not too likely anytime soon). I've always had to stick with Windows for the last 8 years or so just because I wanted to be able to play popular games - but as soon as consoles start using mouse and keyboard, or more games are built for Linux then there will be no reason to have to deal with Microsoft products (apart from at my job, d'oh!..). In fact I'm becoming less interested in gaming as I get older, though I think that may be because more games these days are utter bollocks, rather than me losing interest in gaming. Anyway, I'm rambling. Vive le humiliation!
which is totally what she said
The thing is a damned pentium can handle both, why can't a dual core do it when it has one core to do the networking and one to play music? It might not be an earth shattering end of the world type problem, but it is still a problem that should not exist. Why the hell can a system that is 50+ times more powerfull than an old junker running windows 98 not be able to do the same tasks without slowdown? This is one of the reasons why I haven't upgraded from XP to vista yet, because even with a modern system it offers nothing that would improve my productivity and gaming, only things that would slow it down. Here's hoping developers hold off on making DX10 only games until MS gets their act together and fixes stupid bugs/slowdowns like this.
This seems by design, at least in WinXPSP2.
Since the windows audio service runs in the same process as the networking services..."
I actually decided to perform my own test on this. I used iperf to record the bandwidth to my CentOS box, and ran Winamp, alternating between playing and not playing. I also tested with VLC playing and with both VLC and Winamp closed. I tested them several times, and I couldn't find any difference in network speed sans entropy. Through my tiny 100Mbit switch, I was getting roughly 44-60Mbits with nothing indicating a speed increase/decrease due to audio playing/not playing.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
turn off the darn defender! hasn't nobody noticed
:P
that windows defender really slows down file accesses?
it's really awful - slower than even symantec's products
Oh, that's a cheery project name.. or maybe optimistic in kind of an evil-genius way. It brought to mind kind of singularity.
I'll tell you what advantages Vista has to offer over XP, when you tell me what advantages XP has over 2k.
If you want to compare upgrade cycles, then let us compare them.
Kid-proof tablet..
No, the real thing probably is, as other posters alleged, the whole DRM crap being wrapped in lots of "do not interrupt me, I'm doing terribly important things" kernel locks. And if a package arrives during that time, sorry your CPU is busy with its Digital Restrictions Management.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Mark Russinovich posted a fairly in-depth and technical explanation of this problem. It's worth taking a look at.
2 007/08/27/1833290.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/
Ummm... as I already stated in this topic, I don't. BUT... even if I choose not to run Vista that does not mean that the company I work for didn't buy into MS's "Faster, better, more secure" pitch and upgrade all their workstations and server to Vista leaving me no choice.
Fortunately for me, the company I work for isn't that stupid... but enough companies have switched. Regardless, you are still missing (ignoring) the more important point in my posts - which is this is not normal, it is not acceptable, it is not a wanted feature (DRM be damned), and it should not be happening on any piece of hardware that is out today.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
You are telling ME not to be stupid? What the heck type computer are YOU running that your CPU can't handle playing an MP3 and handling network traffic? An Etch-A-Sketch? I know in the Linux and OS/2 world, all you need is a 486 to handle those "monumental" tasks without corrupting your audio stream... on Windows (XP/Vist/Whatever) I am pretty sure that a Dual Core 3+GHz system should easily be able to handle it.
There is NO VALID technical reason why this behavior should occur. Vista may be a resource hog, but it isn't that bad that it needs to sacrifice network speeds in order to play an MP3.
How about you go get a clue... and then don't bother coming back?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Really? That's impressive! I am aware of that claim... but MS made the same claims about Win95 (errr... DOS with an extended Win3.1). And the last stack "they" totally wrote from scratch came from the BSD world - which they then proceeded to hose. I severely doubt the "new" stack was written from scratch. Maybe purchased/borrowed from someone else and modified a whole lot... maybe modified from the XP stack... but written from scratch? Yeah... so was over 80% of Vista by their claims - which we also know not to be true (lots are glommed on parts from Server 2003 and S2003's add-ons, some is from XP, and the rest was a combination of bought (like much of the multimedia editting/playing stuff), borrowed, "borrowed" and the rest possibly written from scratch).
Either way, lets assume you are correct and MS is being truthful - and that the entire stack was written from scratch for Vista... with oh so many performance enhancements (as claimed by MS and posted ALL over the net)... it is still even more reason this should not be occurring...
So, it doesnt matter how you/I look at it... whether MS's claims of a total re-write are true or not... their claims of far superior performance in the "new"/new stack obviously aren't a reality when you play an MP3 that itself should be using .5% of your CPU power...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Stop giving them ideas!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I just wanted to ssy... I called him an idiot first, and it was stupid and immature -hey I was drunk. Oops. Anyway, my immature taunt likely set him off and made him act differently than he normally would have. Giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and taking the blame :-)
Thanks for the backup though (not that I'm implying you intended to take my side or anything, don't get me wrong. No assumption made).
What I said is: of course there will be bugs if it's new code. New code always means risk and doubtful benefits, if any. They also moved the sound code around, and did some dubious "optimizations" to keep it flowing by throttling whatever. It's amazing what some people will do when their code doesn't work as expected...
Yes, the Windows TCP stack was originally based on the BSD stack (it may have been originally based on the Lachman port of BSD networking, since that was the TCP stack available in Microsoft's Xenix). This stack did not remain untouched for long, and by the release of Windows 2000 it's unlikely that anything but the userland applications were still based on Berkeley code.
I'm not arguing that Microsoft hadn't substantially changed the stack in Vista. Just noting that it wasn't BSD code they replaced if they did so.
Personally, I would prefer it if Microsoft retained the BSD stack. Saying that they were using one of the most reliable and best supported stacks out there rather than doing what Allen Cox did in Linux and reimplement it would hardly count as "bashing" Microsoft. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
Why do people have such a hard time sticking to the issue? You honestly think even a 50% drop in network efficiency is okay, because the guy shouldn't be listening to MP3s on a work computer? That's his boss's problem, but audio device usage causing a drop in network speed could potentially be my problem too if I ever get stuck using Vista, and I think that's unacceptable. People have tried every frankly stupid excuse imaginable to rationalize or trivialize this, and none of them touch on the point that it's inexcusable that playing audio cuts your network speed (at least) in half.
--Obyron