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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."
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
No, it's not. Read the old FA:
However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput.
"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.
Good thinking.
If it accessing the onboard TPM this is quite likely. I cann bet that they smacked a few global locks around those accesses just in case to ensure that a silly race condition in the access will not allow someone to break through the precious DRM. PC TPMs are disgustingly slow so every access leads to a fairly long period when interrupts are not being serviced. As a result the system capability to process interrupts drastically decreases whenever the DRM subsystem has been activated. Add to that some priority to multimedia and the picture will be exactly as observed.
This is all hypothetical of course, but it more or less makes sense. I would not be surprised if that is the case.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702
Just follow any CFS thread (or any Linux scheduler threads in the archive), the new shiny Linux scheduler.
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.