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Mark Russinovich On Vista Network Slowdown
koro666 writes "In his latest blog post, Mark Russinovich analyzes the network slowdown experienced by some users when playing multimedia content. 'Tests of MMCSS during Vista development showed that... heavy network traffic can cause enough long-running DPCs to prevent playback threads from keeping up with their media streaming requirements, resulting in glitching. MMCSS' glitch-resistant mechanisms were therefore extended to include throttling of network activity. It does so by issuing a command to the NDIS device driver... [to] pass along, at most 10 packets per millisecond (10,000 packets per second)... [T]he networking team is actively working with the MMCSS team on a fix that allows for not so dramatically penalizing network traffic, while still delivering a glitch-resistant experience.'"
Vista's real-time media scheduler was designed specifically for these demands and allows Vista to run these threads in real-time, and is why even non-assisted HD Video will run ok on Vista, and it WILL NOT run well on XP or even Linux or OSX without hardware specific decoding, no matter what everyone here thinks. That's fine and dandy, even congrats to them, except I don't use hi-def content. At all. I never will with the 2 machines I own now, I never would on a machine I bought tomorrow, because I don't even own a hi-def TV and my monitor is not large enough to offer me any real benefit from a hi-def video.
Regardless, Microsoft will not allow the sales of anything but this special purpose OS aimed at exactly what I don't do on 99% of machines being sold these days. THAT is what I'm bitching about.
I'm the guy that gets stuck with lower bandwidth in my huge file transfers while I listen to music and code. I have been able to do that under every OS since 1995 given at least a 200 mhtz processor. It's not too much to ask in 2007.
I love how people here simplify this issue, yet have very little understanding of the actually numbers of performance factor in, nor even look at the OSS OSes that can't even do some of the things they are 'bitching' about Vista not doing 'well enough'. Name something that is actually related to technical (read: not "the software was designed and written for the other system only but you can't run it!!!111!!!111!cos(0)" ) that vista can do that can't be done in an open source OS. Other than decode their DRM - we didn't want that in the first place.