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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."
Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
How many lights are there again? Five?
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.
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.
Oh, I see,
as in "slightly pregnant" or "slightly dead"??
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
All in all, the performance hit is obviously expected behaviour. I guess it's just the severity of the hit that's unexpected.
They'd probably planned just a 70% performance hit, but we can see their software performs better than expected.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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
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.
"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.
How many lights are there again?
...buffering...
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."
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
Sure they can.
They just cannot run Vista at the same time.
Ignore this signature. By order.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702
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?
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.
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!
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!
No, they're three descriptions of the same OS in decreasing order of product experience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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