Microsoft Responds To Vista's Network And Audio Problems

[Guest Reimar]

Microsoft Responds To Vista's Network and Audio Problems

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. Thanks to pacpis for this news.

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.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft. Here are some points of interest:

* "We have been looking into this problem and are working on a doc that will go into the technical details of what we have found."

* "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."

* "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."

* "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."

* "Two other things to note. 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."

* "Second, this trade-off scheme only kicks in on the receive side. Transmit is not affected."

I've been doing some more research into this and I'm coming to the conclusion that the issue is related somehow to Multimedia Class Scheduler service (MMCSS). This is a service that makes sure that multimedia applications have prioritized access to CPU resources. I can't prove my theory because killing MMCSS also disables Windows audio.

[Richard-BKK]

90% drop in networking performance necessary to simply play an MP3 I can play MP3 on the slowest computer I can think of. And everything I mean it is possible to play MP3 on a processor not faster then what can be found in the first commodore C64 home computer (in this case 64 had nothing to do with the processor, it was the amount of kilobytes).

[Guest Reimar]

90% drop in networking performance necessary to simply play an MP3 I can play MP3 on the slowest computer I can think of. And everything I mean it is possible to play MP3 on a processor not faster then what can be found in the first commodore C64 home computer (in this case 64 had nothing to do with the processor, it was the amount of kilobytes).

Sure MS is comparing with Media Player 11! MP11 needs alot more resources than the older versions. A Player without any "Gimmiks" would need just a few resources and will play under nearly all conditions.

But here we talking from Windows Vista and it's a shame that a "simple" Multimedia program need that much resources that other necessary software has to give up 90%!

And it's true, the Networking under Vista is much more slow than under XP or 2000!

[Richard-BKK]

Hmm guess Microsoft is doing the Slow-Dance, with the smart people going for Samba.

P.S. Samba is Microsoft networking on Linux computers

Edited August 28, 2007 by Richard-BKK