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MS Responds To Vista's Network / Audio Problems
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 26, 2007 01:05 PM
from the designed-that-way dept.
from the designed-that-way dept.
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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Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance? 748 comments
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."
Submission: MS responds to Vista's network and audio problems. by Anonymous Coward
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Typical (Score:4, Funny)
Two plus two is five. War is peace. Rinse, repeat.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Typical (Score:5, Funny)
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New OS has old problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
Re: Deployment (Score:5, Interesting)
We harp on MS a lot, but they ARE clever in certain ways. Suppose someone is thinking Big Picture in some kind of twisted sense. They can play a variant of GoodGuy/BadGuy by having a "Sacrificial OS" every 8 years. They're somehow getting us to pay for their beta testing. They HAD to get Vista out, period, and rely on their patented brand of bluster to get through it. They were getting serious heat from inactivity. I bet someone got utterly crushed when they had to switch codebases during that dev setback.
I barely heard of Win Me - consecutive tips told me to get Win2000, which lasted me through 2.5 OS changes from MS. Then in the early days, I saw a lovely crash&burn act on XP *SP2* until everyone repaired their firmware. I even had some flash devices that I had to return until the factory shipped ones with newer firmware.
Now XP is their heavy duty workhorse while they experiment with their new codebase. Suppose just for a moment that Vista NEVER works... but what they learned from Vista SP1 gets applied to Windows 7 (anyone got a codename yet?). Then maybe by 2010 all the results of history on the media scene will be in, maybe they will back off from DRM, and take some other focus. If they don't screw it up, Vista will be that smile in techie's forums, Windows 7 will be the new 8 year workhorse, and off we go ever after.
Having cash flow the size of a country must be fun.
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Re: Deployment (Score:5, Interesting)
Good "conspiracy theory". Ever heard of Singularity [microsoft.com]? Whole OS written in C, Assembler and Managed .NET. They've end-of-lifed FoxPro and VB6, I'm sure that ASP will dying. They've started moving big chunks of Office 2007 to .NET so it's probably just a matter of a few years before they're ready to dump everything into managed code and start rolling out Singularity (Windows 2010?).
You're really not that far off, people have been "waiting" for Vista, but this is really a throwaway OS, nobody is using it and it's not like business is "clamoring" for even this version. Heck many Enterprises have just finish rolling out XP. The new WPF and WCF will surely be functional under Singularity, and Enterprises are just now moving to Managed Code applications (check out the market for ".NET developers"). MS won't die away if this Vista "fails", so we're probably all looking at a Managed Code future in 2010 or 2011 :)
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Re:New OS has old problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Same old song and dance. (Score:5, Funny)
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Three different OS's? (Score:5, Funny)
No, they're three descriptions of the same OS in decreasing order of product experience.
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Back in 1994... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Back in 1994... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows can't compete with a 1 Mhz computer made in 1992 with 38,911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
[]
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Re:Back in 1994... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Back in 1994... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Parent is a troll. (Score:5, Funny)
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"It's not a bug, it's a limitation." (Score:4, Interesting)
ITS (Score:4, Insightful)
REally? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:REally? (Score:5, Insightful)
That it's caused by the DRM subsystem.
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Re:REally? (Score:5, Informative)
If it accessing the onboard TPM this is quite likely. I cann bet that they smacked a few global locks around those accesses just in case to ensure that a silly race condition in the access will not allow someone to break through the precious DRM. PC TPMs are disgustingly slow so every access leads to a fairly long period when interrupts are not being serviced. As a result the system capability to process interrupts drastically decreases whenever the DRM subsystem has been activated. Add to that some priority to multimedia and the picture will be exactly as observed.
This is all hypothetical of course, but it more or less makes sense. I would not be surprised if that is the case.
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Re:REally? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me, after using Vista: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
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Re:REally? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words they see a bug especially on gigabit connections.
Now back to yoru regularly scheduled bitching and "ZOMG my calculator gets better performance" fact-free discussion.
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Re:REally? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design."
In other words they see a bug especially on gigabit connections.
Yes. The bug is that the audio system has any correlation whatsoever, however minor and imperceptible, with the frickin' network stack, and even moreso that this is expected.
It's not expected behavior. I don't care how much they jump up and down and cry that most people won't notice, this is bullshit.
Me: Every time I get in my car, a hammer pops out and hits me in the jaw, painfully.
GM: That's a bug. It shouldn't hurt so much.
Rational observer: WTF?
There's no lost context or missing information. The facts are that MS is OK with the idea that an MP3 reduces your network throughput. There's really nothing else to say in the matter. That one admitted fact alone is enough to declare it defective by design.
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Internet is all that counts! (Score:4, Funny)
First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations.
So I see! All that matters is the Internet performance of the average user, which is probably what, less than 5Mbps anyway! How silly of me to think there would be a problem with say... trying to access a corporate file server to work with say really big data files? Wow, I'm really going to recommend Vista to my clients now!
"..slight.."?? (Score:5, Funny)
as in "slightly pregnant" or "slightly dead"??
From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Interesting)
"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
Re:From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Funny)
*Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB DDR
Holy shit, get off my lawn x 1 billion!
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Re:From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, when audio recording, you don't want to use Microsoft's typical sound system - you want to record using ASIO which goes through less buffering and latency. If you record using the regular sound system, you end up with perhaps 100s of ms of lag, which is a bitch when you're trying to record to a metronome.
As some AC above noted, Linux only has a direct audio IO path when using jackd. Otherwise, everything is buffered a plenty.
So I think it has nothing to do with CPU power, and more to do with "Vista is a real-time multimedia machine!" When you're interrupting a LOT to be attentive to the audio device, this is going to interfere with the network, whereas if you just interrupt less regularly but send larger amounts of buffered data you don't have that problem.
*Fair warning, my facts may not be 100% accurate, but I think this is the gist of the problem.
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FTA (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [auckland.ac.nz]', 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.
Enough with the Microsoft bashing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
What a Load of... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 New and Improved Anti-Piracy (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't believe it (Score:5, Informative)
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 [crashnet.org] 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 [mirrorshades.org] (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.
Maybe RTFA before writing the summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
If the alternative to Microsoft FUD is Anti-Microsoft FUD, I'm not sure we're much better off.
Good workaround (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [kjonigsen.net] 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 [auckland.ac.nz].
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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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10% (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:missing tag? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:missing tag? (Score:5, Funny)
Well of course they are expecting a performance hit, after all they aren't "just trying to play an MP3" they have to do 7 different DRM related processes while playing an MP3, on top of Sony's hack of your webcam doing a biometrics check to verify that you are the original purchaser. Seriously though, does the drop still happen if you play a DRM free MP3 on a non-MS player?
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Re:missing tag? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it still happens.
The original reports noted that foobar2000 was just as affected as WMP. The problem occurs when the audio driver is in use. Interestingly, pausing foobar2000 seemed to release the audio driver (network performance went back to normal) while pausing WMP did not. VLC performs in a similar manner to foobar2000, although bypassing the audio device (decoding straight to a null device) results in no slow down.
So, no, it's not the checking for DRM while unwrapping the MP3 like you suggest. You can do that quite happily via VLC, provided you don't intend on HEARING it. ;-)
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M$ expected behaviour! (Score:5, Informative)
That is utter BS. On a decade old machine, its possible to run a network and audio playback at real time speeds. Given the power of even low end PCs these days (minimum spec Vista machines) its crazy they cannot handle both together.
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Re:M$ expected behaviour! (Score:5, Funny)
Sure they can.
They just cannot run Vista at the same time.
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Re:M$ expected behaviour! (Score:5, Informative)
Even my G3 iMac with OSX 10.3.9, which it wasn't designed to run at all, could do that, using iTunes and running Firefox and Thunderbird and Skype (all memory- and CPU hogs) at the same time.
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Re:M$ expected behaviour! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:missing tag? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:missing tag? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What Microsoft said makes sense-SO WHY??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So why is it that Win XP never had this problem on slower hardware? Nor Win2K, ME, 98SE, 98, 95...
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