VISTA Performance IF ALL ELSE FAILS AND YOU WANT TO SCREAM

[banaman]

I upgraded to Vista Ultimate x64 last week and as you would expect from a tier
1 operating system from M$ - my reads from my trusty X6 went down from 27MB/Sec to a horrific 7MB/Sec ... oh and the old explorer hanging thing I remember well from my first Beta copy of Windows 95 was creeping back.

Long long long long long story very short - I had 2 problems
1. Machine slow and tended to hang when I was doing a lot of "netwok" tasks
2. Transfers to NAS bad (read 7MB/Sec write better at ~15MB/Sec

I tried all the things listed here, an older gigE card (RT8169) turning off services, remote compression, QoS, transport layers .... nothing. Tonight I went back to it and moved back to one of my x38's gigE ports - connected directly to the NAS box - same performance. At the same time I happened to notice my windows sidebar had thrombied so I killed it. I went to back to copy my, now very worn, 800MB test file expecting the drag and drop to show 1 minute 35 seconds and to my surprise it started at 20 seconds and ripped through it. I opened the resource monitor and copied it again 33MB/Sec OMG

Started SideBar again ....... 7MB/Sec - did this 184 times just to make sure - yup; that's what it was. Next - what in my sidebar was causing the problem - first thing killed off was the bbc live video feed - yup that's what it was. Nice feature - i'm glad I paid extra for it.

Ok so this is the first thing fixed - secondly the boggy-ness of my machine and the slow torrent downloads point at one old friend - the half open TCP connections from SP2 (I think it was 10) is still there and now it has been upped to 25. Still, a few internet gadgets, email window and a few tools that use loopback sockets and you have a TCP Q again. In the XP days there were patched versions of TCPIP.SYS files that took the limit off (search for EVID 4226 on google). This has also been done for some versions of vista, however watch the version of the TCP file. It is also more complex to install. For example, the offset patch for x64 Vista has just been released. You have to HexEdit it and re-sign it using a tool. I've just finished and the results are stunning. I remember the same when I applied this to my XP SP2 install a few years ago.

Here's the link

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/showth ... 249&page=7

As the subject line says - if all else fails try the above - please make sure you have a bare metal recovery backup of your system though. If you are doing it in Vista x64 take extra care with the instructions, getting the signing wrong will lead to an unbootable system and you'll require to boot from CD and repair.

However - latest beta of FrontView - stunning ... bittorrent client ... very cool and handy ... performance (once I fixed Vista) ... blistering to NAS and external disks. Congratulations on your hard work.

-scott.

[dbott67]

Nice work, Scott. Thanks for the tips.

-Dave

[jcollins]

The BBC Live stream makes me think it was the network autothrottle in Vista when playing "protected" content. To "ensure your viewing performance". I thought that was "fixed", but it sounds like it wasn't.

[HeadlessCow]

It's fixed in the sense that there's no longer a bug when you have multiple network interfaces. It also now provides a way (via the registry) to tweak how much the throttling is. There's no "fix" for the fact that some applications request the throttling and the system responds by doing throttling.

You can look at this KB article for info on how to adjust it.

[jcollins]

Thanks for the link to the KB. Very interesting. Funny line:

The processing of network packets on a computer is a resource-intensive task. On high bandwidth links, network traffic consumes even more system resources. Additionally, multimedia programs are time sensitive, and such programs require prioritized access to CPU resources.

Considering you're running a pretty beefy system for Vista, it shouldn't take that much in the way of resources...

[jimwillsher]

Hi all,

Thanks to HeadlessCow for the link to this KB article. With Vista SP1, and by disabling the throttling (FFFFFFFF value) I now get sustained read speeds of 34MB/s copy from the NAS to my laptop.

Says it all really - THROTTLING of performance. Only Microsoft....


Jim

NV+ with 1GB, NetGear GS716T Switch, No jumbo frames.

[dbott67]

Thanks Jim & HeadlessCow! I've added your findings the "Vista Performance Issues" thread as well.

-Dave

[dgahagan]

Installed SP1 and disabled throttling and still nothing but slow performance.

[dgahagan]

IO Meter Results with Vista SP1 and disabled throttling over wireless G.

Write 4.46MBps
Read 0.38MBps

[dbott67]

What version of firmware are you using in your ReadyNAS?