Researchers Sour on Vista Service Pack 1 Performance

Stony Stevenson passed us a link indicating that a group of researchers has described Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as basically a performance dud. Researchers from the Devil Mountain Software group is claiming that a series of in-house benchmark tests showed that users hoping to receive a speed boost from the update will be disappointed. "Devil Mountain ran its DMS Clarity Studio framework on a laptop Barth described as a "barn burner" -- dual-core processor, dedicated graphics, and either 1GB or 2GB of memory -- to compare performance of the SP1 release candidate that Microsoft released last week with the RTM version that hit general distribution last January. The Vista RTM was not updated with any of the bug fixes, patches or performance packs that Microsoft has pushed through Windows Update since the operating system's debut. 'One gigabyte, 2GB [of memory], it didn't make a difference,' said [CTO Craig] Barth. 'SP1 was never more than 1% or 2% faster.'"

Comments

Optimization

[ktappe]

50 million lines of code and they couldn't find anything that needed optimization?? Or were their priorities elsewhere? These days, optimization always seems to be relegated to "low man on the totem pole."

Re:Optimization

[UncleTogie]

Does average joe care about optimizations? Probably not. Are they important? To people like you and I, sure, but not to average joe.

Yes, it DOES matter to Joe. Joe, however, won't call it "code optimization". Joe will simply say that "Vista runs slower than my XP did!" He doesn't care WHY it's so, but even Joe can tell the difference in speed.

We have a lot of Joes come through our shop. They notice.

Re:Optimization

[sumdumass]

Well, seeing how this machine was so "hot" in the hardware section, it could be that the bottleneck wasn't in the OS at all. IT could be that it has cycles to spare but is waiting on the memory bus to see any increase in performance. They could have been maxing out everything that would have restricted the OS from performing and never saw the "issue" in the first place.

Of course there was/is an issue, Vista just seems slow. In the former example, they wouldn't have seen the issue because something else would be slowing it down. But on a lesser machine, I'm wondering if the optimizations would have a more dramatic effect. I mean a machine where the memory or processor is limited and the actual execution of the code was keeping it slow. Will it allow the code to be executed faster on a processor that is maxed out all the time?

Re:That's a release candidate

[mkraft]

A release candidate should be identical to the actual release; that's why it's called a "release candidate" and not a beta version. The only things that would be changed between the RC and the release are any major bugs such as crashes, exploits, etc. Any performance tweaks would have already been done by the time it hit release candidate status. Similarly any debugging code that would slow things down would have also been removed.

Re:How to "speed up" Vista

[Drencrom]

It seems you have to do a lot of research to get vista working decently. I guess this proves that it is not yet ready for the desktop :)

Bias

[Nanite]

I'm sure the only thing tying you to Windows these days is your own aging skill-set. Let's face it, Windows has always been your bread-and-butter as a programmer right? Well one could see why you would feel slighted when others bash what you've spent a large amount of your life learning and suffering with. The cold truth is: The Windows skill-set is in danger if MS keeps dropping the ball. Every time MS drops a steaming pile of OS on the market, more people make the switch to Apple, or Linux, and your skill-set degrades just a notch. The thought of mass defections from Windows probably makes you wake up in a cold sweat at night. Well, I'm not going to sugar-coat it: Vista is turning many people elsewhere, and Apple is making all the right moves in the market right now to swiftly pick those disenfranchised folks up. It's only a matter of time before the market tips and non-windows machines are the minority in many areas. It may not be tomorrow, or even ten years from now, but I've lost all hope in MS pulling up from the tailspin they are in.

In closing, I think that there is no better time then RIGHT NOW to expand your skill-set to include Windows agnostic developing. Because I'm of the opinion that there is a huge shift happening in the market right now, just very slowly...

Re:Are we shocked?

[syousef]

So what you're saying is that you don't care because it's not your primary OS. Those that do care may be thinking of it running as their primary OS. Heck they may be forced to do so at work in a couple of years. Their LIVING may depend on it.

I do use XP as my primary OS at home and at work and you bet I care. It ain't my spare car. It's my primary ride.

How is the parent modded as insightful? He's saying he doesn't give a shit because he hardly uses it.

Re:How to "speed up" Vista

[stewbacca]

Anyway, if you actually know how Windows works, you'll know what you don't want running and what you do.

I think that sentence basically makes the point for all Mac users on the planet.

Re:Are we shocked?

[roystgnr]

Bad permissions cause Vista to copy files VERY slowly because it has to reset them on all files.

On the Lame Excuses List, this falls somewhere above "You can't take bottled water on an airplane or the terrorists might win" but still doesn't beat out "He only hits me because he loves me."

If the equivalents of "cp -r" and "cp -pr" take noticeably different amounts of time to complete on your operating system, something is broken, because a multi-gigahertz processor can finish fiddling with even complicated permission bits long before a 50MB/s disk needs to have them ready to write.