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."

Comments

Re:Nice error, the drop is 10%

[LinuxGeek]

No, the network speed drops to ~10-15% of non-audio playing speed. Very significant issue.

Re:missing tag?

[stinerman]

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.

Re:Nice error, the drop is 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702

I didn't believe it

[rantingkitten]

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.