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Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?

Posted by kdawson on Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:06 AM
from the sound-of-your-network-on-vista dept.
Operating Systems Software Windows Bug Networking
An anonymous reader writes "Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. 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. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking."
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Submission: Vista poor network performance caused by MP3s by Anonymous Coward
[+] MS Responds To Vista's Network / Audio Problems 528 comments
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."
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  • Conspiracy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso (153703) * on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:07AM (#20304861) Homepage Journal
    This is clearly an attempt by Microsoft to encourage people to buy more music to listen to while waiting to download the the upgrade to Vista SP1. I have pictures of a meeting between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at a Carl's Jr. Steve handed an envelope under the table to Bill. Who knew?!?! Now it all makes sense why iTunes was promoting a track last week called "The Biggest EULA of Her Life" by Randy Newman.

      • Re:Incompetence! Opportunity! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cp.tar (871488) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:41PM (#20308345) Journal

        First of all, 2007 is halfway over; so far, I haven't seen major user migrations towards Linux, and I highly doubt I'll see any by the end of the year.
        People dissatisfied with Vista pre-installed on their laptops don't install Linux; they return the laptops and demand XP.

        Yes, it would be nice to see more people using Linux. And more people will start using Linux. Not, however, enough for us to justly call 2007 the Year of Linux.

        Businesses still depend on Windows-based solutions, and many have signed pacts with the Devil and can't back out easily. Games are still not written with Linux in mind. Major commercial software products are mostly still unavailable on Linux.

        Not until I see e.g. Photoshop and some WoW-equivalent (in popularity, not gameplay) games running natively on Linux will I even begin to think about the Year of Linux.
        And to make one point clear: I like my apps open. I don't program, but it gives me a nice, fuzzy, secure feeling.
        I also like to play a game from time to time - and when I do, I don't think much about software freedom and open source.

  • how on earth? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by networkBoy (774728) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:08AM (#20304877) Homepage Journal
    WTF?
    How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?
    PCI resource scheduler issue? I'd love to see Disk I/O on a fast RAID Vs sound usage...
    -nB

    • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by glop (181086) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:19AM (#20305019)
      Well, the CPU scheduler could be at fault. They might want to make sure that your audio does not skip. Therefore the sound-using application might get a higher priority, or other I/O bound applications may be throttled to leave room for the audio and make sure there are not too many network interrupts to service that may block the sound.

      So, you see, it's a feature, not a bug ;-)

      • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LWATCDR (28044) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:26AM (#20305157) Homepage Journal
        Actually that sort of makes sense. The question then is does it effect other IO? Maybe writing to a drive? Would it show up in task manager?
        So far I find you explanation the most likely if unpopular.
        I sort of want some proof before I start stringing people up.

        • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Funny)

          by AshtangiMan (684031) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:39AM (#20305375)
          I sort of want some proof before I start stringing people up.

          You must be new here . . . but how did you grab such a low UID?

        • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by GIL_Dude (850471) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:02AM (#20305807) Homepage
          Well we do know that there are new API's in Vista that allow reservations of bandwidth for devices (like disk drives) and that media player does indeed make use of them (this has been demonstrated at events like Tech-Ed and Mark Russinovich's talks have contained demonstrations of this as well). I can't imagine that they purposefully tried to reserve network bandwidth though when the files are local on your hard drive. You can see why they would reserve some hard drive bandwidth though; as the GP said it is to provide skip-free audio and is indeed a new Vista feature. Sounds like they either have a bug with it where it reserves network bandwidth when it doesn't need to, or it is something to do with it having to reserve a certain percentage of the total number of interrupts regardless of which device is being triggered?

          • Call me old-skool, but... (Score:5, Informative)

            by Doctor Memory (6336) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @12:14PM (#20306939) Homepage

            You can see why they would reserve some hard drive bandwidth though; as the GP said it is to provide skip-free audio
            Back in my day (and that was early last Thursday), we had this thing called "buffering", where you actually read more data than you needed, and then when you needed more you got if from the buffer instead of going all the way back out to the disk. Some of us actually used two buffers, and filled one from disk while reading data from the other. This gave us a fair amount of isolation from I/O scheduling and transfer delays. Guess that just shows what fools we were, instead of coming up with a fancy bandwidth reservation scheme to regulate everything.

            Hand me down my silly-scope, Maw, the danged computer's a-runnin' slow agin...

      • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Informative)

        by torkus (1133985) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:32AM (#20305269)
        That's great but my Pentium 1 - 133Mhz CPU could play MP3s. The tiny 'couple mW' CPU in the ipod shuffle can play MP3s. You expect me to believe that a modern computer is having CPU contention issues over the processing power to play a MP3? Even with the bloatware that is know as Vista...playing a MP3 can't need more power than opening Excel or Word.

      • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by The MAZZTer (911996) <megazzt&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:21AM (#20306089) Homepage

        Vista does put in place measures to ensure that multimedia applications have a higher I/O priority than other operations.

        Whoever did these tests should try again with the Multimedia Class Scheduler service disabled to see if it makes a difference. Also they need to try multiple multimedia applications (WMP would benefit from MCS, but other multimedia apps may not yet).

        • Except... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by InvisblePinkUnicorn (1126837) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @12:36PM (#20307333)
          Except that the Windows Audio service depends on MMCSS, so if you try to disable the Multimedia Class Scheduler, you can't listen to any music at all.

          For the record, I just tested this bug on Vista Small Business and found the same result. If I load WMP, I can still utilize ~35% of the network, but as soon as I start a song, or have a song paused (or even stopped but still loaded) it drops down to 8-10% every time.

    • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:29AM (#20305201) Homepage Journal

      My guess would be that it's a bug in the PCI code. You interact with network and sound hardware in roughly the same way; write a memory address to a control register and the device DMAs it across. If there's a race condition or stale lock in the code that deals with the PCI bus then data being sent from the network or sound card drivers down through the PCI abstraction layer could be delayed. My guess would be that someone decided to optimise things for media playback, and so put the sound drivers at a higher priority than the network drivers (since most of the time you are more likely to notice audio skipping than slight drops in network performance), and the sound card driver is not releasing a lock in a timely fashion.

      This, of course, comes with a huge disclaimer to the effect that I have no inside information as to the structure of the Vista kernel, and might be completely making all of this up.

      • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Funny)

        by eggoeater (704775) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:11AM (#20305957) Journal

        This, of course, comes with a huge disclaimer to the effect that I have no inside information as to the structure of the Vista kernel, and might be completely making all of this up.
        Yeah, I think that might be Microsoft's problem as well.


    • Re:how on earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gibbs-Duhem (1058152) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:19AM (#20306065)
      Back in 2003, my ethernet card (under debian) would *only* work if I was also playing music. Granted, that was because my ethernet card was broken and didn't properly send interrupts (so the sound card was sending them, and the ethernet driver was being activated when it noticed that it had an interrupt too), but it was still pretty awesome. Perhaps Vista has a similar problem... =)

  • The hits just keep on rolling for Vista (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HangingChad (677530) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:10AM (#20304893) Homepage

    It's like the Top 40 of suck.

    Okay, it's a lot of little things but those add up for many users and businesses. I'm sure MSFT will get all the little niggling things fixed...eventually. The main issue I see is that MSFT really needed a home run with Vista and what they fielded wasn't much of an improvement even when it's working properly. And certainly not worth the cost differential.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArcherB (796902) * on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:11AM (#20304903) Journal
    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.

    Wow! I bet streaming audio must suck!

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:18AM (#20304999)
      Wow! I bet streaming audio must suck!

      Whatever you do, absolutely do not try this with RealPlayer on Vista. That has the potential to result in catastrophic system failure.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

        by dyslexicbunny (940925) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:53AM (#20305619)
        I just tried it ago five minutes ago. As soon as I started streaming, all my cable in the house caught fire and my house burned down. Then a Microsoft guy came and peed on the ashes. It was awful.
  • For those of you thinking this is a hardware or a driver issue, RTFA. In the posts in this thread, many many different hardware combinations were tried, including one guy who used USB audio hardware. Sorry, but it ain't a hardware or driver issue...it's almost certainly a flaw or a bug in Vista.

    Could be DRM, maybe, but that's just speculation. One guy said he stripped the audio from a video and played just the video, so I'm not certain it's DRM, either.

  • Microsoft user here. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pojut (1027544) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:21AM (#20305055) Homepage
    I have been a long time Microsoft user (notice I didn't say supporter, simply user) I've given OSX and various flavours of Linux a shot, but for whatever reason I decide to stay with Windows every time...no particular reason, I just like the interface the best...maybe it's cause I was raised on it, I dunno. Been using windows regularly since Windows 3.1.

    Now. That being said. Ever since I saw screens of "longhorn" and the list of proposed features, I was excited. I knew a lot of it wouldn't be in the retail release, but still...Microsoft had me more excited about an operating system than I had been since the first press releases of Windows 95. It wasn't just Aero (which frankly doesn't really sway me one way or the other), it was primarily the little tweaks and things that they were talking about. Vista looked like it was going to be mind blowing.

    And then it was released. Every week, some new story surfaces about something not working right, or something being broken, or some kind of fucked compatability...as it stands, I don't think Vista will ever be on my computer. XP works fantastic for me (although I do have an Ubuntu box hooked up to my computer for movie and TV show playback), and Vista seems to case more problems than it solves.

    Grats, MS. Unless you pull something out of your asses soon, you are going to lose more and more users such as myself. And we are important insofar as your desktop buisness goes, because we KNOW you are full of shit and we still don't care.

    We are starting to care, though.

  • Synopsis (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stinerman (812158) <nathan.stine@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:24AM (#20305109) Homepage
    The forum goers seem to think the problem lays with something called MMCSS that boosts audio priority when files are being played back. This looks to be a buggy scheduler rather than nefarious DRM checks mucking up performance. The problem hasn't been pinned down by a long shot, but the scheduler makes the most sense.

  • Clearly (Score:5, Funny)

    by Colin Smith (2679) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:36AM (#20305325)
    Microsoft's customers, the music industry, have to make sure that the criminals who play music over the internet are very limited in the amount of intellectual property they are able to steal.

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If you don't like it, there are plenty of alternatives out there.

     

  • Make it work / DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dpilot (134227) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:55AM (#20305667) Homepage Journal
    How many YEARS now has the goal for software been to simply, "Make it work," and we STILL haven't been happy.

    But Vista is something absolutely new under the sun. Vista is the first time that a major portion of the goal has been to, "Make it NOT work, some of the time." That's right, non-functionality is a key goal of Vista, because that's really what DRM is. Under the "wrong circumstances," don't work, or at least degrade operation. (Who knows, maybe "degrade operation" is an even tougher goal than "don't work.")

    So here we have it, conflicting goals:

    - Work! Do what the user wants you to do.
    - Don't work! The user is naughty even asking you to do that!
    and the hardest...
    - Figure out when to work, and when to not work.

    A much more subtle set of requirements than normal software. An important facet is that it blurs the notion of "who's in charge?"

    - With OSS, the user/programmer is in charge.
    - With Windows up to XP, the user is in charge, though Microsoft has a few deeply-buried probably-static exceptions.
    - With Vista...

    • Re:Could be DRM related (Score:5, Insightful)

      by networkBoy (774728) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:19AM (#20305015) Homepage Journal
      Not likely, as on the forums many users report multicore systems being nearly completely idle. Unless the box is phoning home, but even then that should only amount to your broadband speed being absent from the total. Anything that would rob 95% of your TCP stacks should show up as heavy CPU usage. I'm betting money on the PCI handler for the audio being borked.
      -nB

      • Re:Could be DRM related (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rcpitt (711863) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:19AM (#20306055) Homepage Journal
        Has anyone checked to see if the CPU usage display is really correct?

        Maybe Redmond in their infinite wisdom are hiding all the DRM processing in a way that doesn't show up on the CPU use graphs - but impacts the system performance because in reality the CPUs are all pegged doing DRM compares to see if heuristic signatures match copyright violations.

    • Or more accurately (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Y2KDragon (525979) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:23AM (#20305103)
      Installing Vista slows Vista performance. Still don't see any reason why someone would use this as an OS over XP right now.

      • Not very accurate (Score:5, Funny)

        by Liquidrage (640463) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:01PM (#20307763)
        I think it's a superior OS to XP. I think the design is more secure and stable, though I consider XP to be rather stable as well.

        The new look and feel can be turned off, in which case it certainly isn't slower. I'd consider it faster then XP to be honest.
        I like its smart use of dead cycles and unused RAM for indexing and precaching. I like the new explorer options and much improved searching.

        All in all it's certainly a step forward.
        I don't know if I'd say it's worth upgrading over XP for most people that are running XP just fine now. But I certainly would suggest Vista over XP if one were going to be buying one OS or the other.

        • Re:Or more accurately (Score:5, Insightful)

          by I(rispee_I(reme (310391) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:07AM (#20305913) Journal
          Continuing your reasoning, I see few reasons anyone would use XP as an OS over 2K...
          except Microsoft no longer offers updates for 2K, and Visual Studio plays more nicely
          with XP (for example, the DirectX SDK hasn't installed on 2K for two years).

          This will eventually provide your reason for people to use Vista: They will have little
          choice.

            • Re:Or more accurately (Score:5, Funny)

              by nschubach (922175) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:07PM (#20307839) Journal
              I hear Duke Nukem Forever is exclusive to Windows PecanPie and DirectX 11 (Whipped Cream Edition) since it could never run on some weak DX10 platform due to the new hyper-channel mega buss that cannot be back-ported into such a weak platform. They also claim at least 349% boost to disk access rates simply by using off the shelf Microsoft Win-SSD Ultra drives (available only at a premium price of 40% above other drives).

    • Re:antiFUD of poorest quality (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:31AM (#20305249)
      Of course you can write anything you want negatve about MS in /. and some fanboys will refuse to believe it with one anecdotal test....

      • Re:not really (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gsfprez (27403) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @10:52AM (#20305591)
        if people are used to Windows...as you say....

        then they better not buy Office 2007. its nothing the fsck like Office 2003, 2000, 97, or 95.

        They also should keep using XP, because Vista is totally different than XP.

        Me - i'm at the point when someone tells me they have a problem with their computer, i say "wow. i don't have that problem. My Mac just works." and i continue my day. I don't think about it, i don't say it smugly. I just don't care.

        I stare at them in cold silence because if i told them that my car was blowing up or catching fire or refused to start they'd say "huh.. i'd get a new car, and not the same kind".

        I got to the point where i didn't want to help people any more that use Windows. Because i dont care. I can't care. It was consuming all my free time becuase "oh, he can help, he knows computers".

        I help my mom, and my wife. I bought my mom a Mac mini, and my wife as a MacBook. And i have never had to reinstall my mom's Mac mini (i reinstalled Windows XP on her HP 4 times).

        Everyone else has to fend for themselves - i don't care about their problems with their computers any more.

          • Re:you're being passive aggressive (Score:5, Funny)

            by ischorr (657205) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @12:11PM (#20306907)
            I always wondered WHY OS X was designed to be so utterly foreign, and incomprehensible for Windows users to pick up. I never understood why you have to stand on a balance bar and lean to interact with the computer. Or why you have to punch a dog in the face to launch a new application. Or why their display device is a constantly reshaping bowl of mashed bananas.

            I guess they just want to Think Different, but you'd think that they'd use desktop and GUI concepts similar to what Windows uses. And yet strangely, several million Windows users started using Macs this year.

    • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Informative)

      by smooc (59753) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:46AM (#20306541) Homepage
      It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM

      See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx [msdn.com]

      • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by trolltalk.com (1108067) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @11:25AM (#20306169) Homepage Journal

        "Actually more likely is the services which handles media getting more cpu time is doing just that, prioritising the audio over the network. Or, it could be HD sound they're playing which is clogging up the limited bandwidth on the PCI bus."

        ... even when sound output is *paused*?

        If a plain duron from the turn of the century could handle 100mps ethernet and play mp3s, there's something seriously wrong with Vista not being able to do the same on modern hardware.

        • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Bazar (778572) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @12:16PM (#20306971)

          "Actually more likely is the services which handles media getting more cpu time is doing just that, prioritising the audio over the network. Or, it could be HD sound they're playing which is clogging up the limited bandwidth on the PCI bus."
          Modern pc's, use a gigabit controler, to offload the bandwidth and processing, before it reaches the pci bus.

          Unless your using a pci network card, or a fairly old/cheap motherboard, it should have nothing to do with the available bandwidth on the pci bus

            • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Grishnakh (216268) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:23PM (#20308103)
              The issue here is that Vista's sound subsystem does a lot more audio processing that previous generations do. For example it will delay the streams to your multichannel system so that the sound from each speaker reaches your head at exactly the same time.

              So why is this necessary on a laptop with 2 speakers?

              • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Funny)

                by jollyreaper (513215) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @02:36PM (#20309243)

                The issue here is that Vista's sound subsystem does a lot more audio processing that previous generations do. For example it will delay the streams to your multichannel system so that the sound from each speaker reaches your head at exactly the same time.
                So why is this necessary on a laptop with 2 speakers?
                Vista is taking into account the delay in the audio reaching your cojoined twin's head? Either that or Vista sucks, not sure which is the more likely explanation.

              • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Informative)

                by orcrist (16312) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @03:16PM (#20309879)

                Unless it can turn the speakers into sonar transcievers all the processing in the world isn't going to be able to do that effectivly.


                Explain to me the difference between speakers and sonar tranceivers? I mean, I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy for only 4 years, so maybe I missed something, but a sonar array is basically a bunch of high-quality underwater microphones and a shitload of audio processing. Essentially doing the reverse of what the poster above claimed Vista does (never mind that that kind of processing ability is what sound cards are *for*). IOW: you're wrong.

                As long as you have more than one channel, audio processing can do exactly that sort of thing; the only problem is, that it would ruin the whole point of multiple channels. You want the audio processing to cause the sounds to reach your ears at different times because than it simulates what happens when something is not directly in front of you. The initial implentation of this technology for consumer purposes has a very familiar name: stereo.

        • Re:DRM strikes again? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Grishnakh (216268) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:32PM (#20308213)
          If a plain duron from the turn of the century could handle 100mps ethernet and play mp3s, there's something seriously wrong with Vista not being able to do the same on modern hardware.

          There's nothing "wrong" with it. It's what we must accept so that our good friends at the RIAA can make sure we're not stealing their excellent music, performed by such brilliant, talented artists like Britney Spears.

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