Your Vista SP 1 experience

[Nothingbetter2do]

the usb drive works perfectly in xp sp3.......the sata2 drive works perfectly in xp sp3........ neither drives work properly with vista x64 sp1... copy files from one location on the c: drive to another location on d: (second partition on same physical drive) takes hours when it does work but most of the time it fails with a not responding error after about 10 mins... why couldnt they just reuse the code xp uses for file transferring...... its tried tested and WORKS correctly why reinvent the wheel when the current one works fine?

My system Specs are as follows

Amd athlon x2 6000+ @ 3.0ghz

Asus M2N E SLI mainboard

XFX nVidia Geforce 8500GT 512MB PCI-E 16x graphics

Hauppauge HVR 1300MCE tv tuner

16x Toshiba DVD Dual layer R/RW/RAM drive

4gb (4x 1024mb) Corsair XMS2 PC6400 DDR RAM

500GB SATA2 Western Digital Hard Drive

Soundblaster Xi FI audio extreme PCI -E x1 soundcard

Buffalo 54g Wifi pci

USB2 Western Digital Book 500gb External Harddrive (Black one)

Surely with a rig like that i should be getting better performance than an old 386 pc in vista....

with XP Pro sp3 (with only 3gb RAM) & Ubuntu x64 on the otherhand is very quick on this rig.

Edited July 15, 2008 by Nothingbetter2do

[CoffeeFiend]

the usb drive works perfectly in xp sp3.......the sata2 drive works perfectly in xp sp3........ neither drives work properly with vista x64 sp1...

One more reason to think you have a driver problem under Vista (problems with nvidia's drivers would hardly be surprising)

why couldnt they just reuse the code xp uses for file transferring

They've actually improved it quite a bit. Details here.

its tried tested and WORKS correctly why reinvent the wheel when the current one works fine?

File copy also works correctly under Vista. They're hardly reinventing the wheel here...

Just a very quick screenshot of transferring a 770MB test file between 2 drives (between SATA drives, from a temp folder folder on C, and the disk I use for VMware images)

That's not even close to the fastest I've seen, but I'd say this is still a perfectly acceptable speed.

[MrCobra]

SP1 to me has made no difference in performance.... im begining to think vista x64 is a lame duck.... am going back to xp sp3 for now until either vista x64 is fixed (sp2 or 3) or windows 7 or whatever vista's replacement is gonna be called comes out...........which ever happens first.

That and the out of memory while copying files bug (which is still present in SP1) are the 2 main reasons I switched back to XP64. Most everything else looked unfinished and like it was slapped together.

this ops sys is rubbish

Yes. The OS must be rubbish! It couldn't be a driver issue (USB or mass storage) or anything like that

Not everyone experiences the "WOW" with Vista. I have very high end machine and Vista was very sluggish. It was a default OS install with the drivers that come on the Vista DVD.

[CoffeeFiend]

I have very high end machine and Vista was very sluggish. It was a default OS install with the drivers that come on the Vista DVD.

Well, there you go. Try with SP1 and up to date drivers, it'll make quite a difference.

Much like the people who were complaining about their games running slower, that's been solved too for the most part.

The thing is, an OS can only be as good as the drivers for your hardware are. Your drivers suck? Windows is gonna suck too -- no matter what version. That's what it all comes down to.

There's no reason for it to be sluggish on a "very high end machine", when it works just as fast as XP on a decent dual core box (that isn't memory starved). Besides, right after installing, things are always a bit more sluggish -- defrag hasn't done its job yet (it'll run when your PC is idle), the index has to be built from scratch, superfetch isn't tuned yet, and just like XP there's some optional stuff you might want to disable (e.g. system restore), etc.

[GrofLuigi]

why couldnt they just reuse the code xp uses for file transferring

They've actually improved it quite a bit. Details here.

I see that Mark Russinovich's article quoted very often. Have you read it entirely?

Unfortunately, the SP1 changes, while delivering consistently better performance than previous versions of Windows, can be slower than the original Vista release in a couple of specific cases. The first is when copying to or from a Server 2003 system over a slow network.

OK, this might be the fault of Server 2003 or the slow network. (But it didn't stop Microsoft taking good money for 5 years for Server2003. Shouldn't they at least issue a hotfix?)

The other case where SP1 might not perform as well as original Vista is for large file copies on the same volume. Since SP1 issues smaller I/Os, primarily to allow the rest of the system to have better access to the disk and hence better responsiveness during a copy, the number of disk head seeks between reads from the source and writes to the destination files can be higher, especially on disks that don’t avoid seeks with efficient internal queuing algorithms.

And this would be... what... the most frequent case of copy operation a normal user would issue?

Summary

File copying is not as easy as it might first appear, but the product team took feedback they got from Vista customers very seriously and spent hundreds of hours evaluating different approaches and tuning the final implementation to restore most copy scenarios to at least the performance of previous versions of Windows and drastically improve some key scenarios. The changes apply both to Explorer copies as well as to ones initiated by applications using the CopyFileEx API and you’ll see the biggest improvements over older versions of Windows when copying files on high-latency, high-bandwidth networks where the large I/Os, SMB2’s I/O pipelining, and Vista’s TCP/IP stack receive-window auto-tuning can literally deliver what would be a ten minute copy on Windows XP or Server 2003 in one minute. Pretty cool.

its tried tested and WORKS correctly why reinvent the wheel when the current one works fine?

File copy also works correctly under Vista. They're hardly reinventing the wheel here...

My understanding of Mark's article is they have (re)invented square wheels with Vista, and with SP1 they've made them oval - drastical improvement.

The "scenario" that is "drastically improved" is "copying files on high-latency, high-bandwidth networks" (how many of these you've got?) and is begging for help from many other subsystems. (So the improvement is in them, not in file copy).

I must mention that I have nothing but utter respect for Mark and his knowledge and integrity, but I doubt even he could go openly against his current employer... So one must read everything carefully.

And to return to the topic again, please remind me why was all this necessary?

GL

[CoffeeFiend]

I see that Mark Russinovich's article quoted very often. Have you read it entirely?

No, I just like to paste URLs to articles I haven't read

OK, this might be the fault of Server 2003 or the slow network. (But it didn't stop Microsoft taking good money for 5 years for Server2003. Shouldn't they at least issue a hotfix?)

From what he says, it's the combination of Win 2003 + slow network, and the issue is with Win2003 itself. They made Vista SP1 use a somewhat slower transfer (smaller blocks) to prevent a problem with Windows 2003's cache manager, instead of fixing Win 2003. I'd hardly blame Vista or this... Besides, just how much difference does it make in real life? 10% slower perhaps? And how often is your network that bloody slow that it affects your servers? And again, would you really rather have a somewhat faster transfer, and then your Win 2003 server crashing because of it?

And this would be... what... the most frequent case of copy operation a normal user would issue?

Again, it's not that simple. A lot of design decisions are tradeoffs. Smaller I/O buffers, for a more responsive system, or bigger chunks for a slightly faster transfer, but a not as responsive system? The problem only applies when you copy to/from the same disk, which is actually not all that common. Most of the time when you do something on the same disk, you move files, not make copies of it, and if it's 2 different drives, then it doesn't increase seeking anyways. It's not like it will make a HUGE difference either (one could make a small app to benchmark a file copy like that with different buffer sizes in no time at all). And again, like he says, this is more of an issue with older disks that don't have NCQ and such. Disk fragmentation itself could easily have a lot more effect than this (increasing seeking lots more). It's really not that bad, and if it makes the system more responsive, then why not?

Another screenshot, about this specific "issue", that speaks for itself (and I really ought to defrag sometime):

I think this is still very acceptable. We're still a VERY long shot from his 10KB/sec file copy issues (by a factor of about 10 thousand)

to restore most copy scenarios to at least the performance of previous versions of Windows

That was a problem with the RTM, which needed some tweaks, and as he says:

Unfortunately, the SP1 changes, while delivering consistently better performance than previous versions of Windows, can be slower than the original Vista release in a couple of specific cases.

As in, it's always faster at all file operations than XP and below, with a couple minor exceptions where it's slower than Vista RTM (where performance isn't bad anyways, just reduced a tiny bit). Notice he doesn't say anywhere that XP is actually faster at anything anywhere. I don't think that really sounds bad.

My understanding of Mark's article is they have (re)invented square wheels with Vista, and with SP1 they've made them oval - drastical improvement.

How's that reinventing the wheel? Using caching (nothing new), tuning buffer size (like any app that does file I/O does), auto RWIN resize (a VERY good thing for your network at high speeds, we used to have to do that by hand), and the next version of the plain old SMB protocol. What's so drastically changed? I'm just not seeing it. It works just fine.

Edited July 15, 2008 by crahak

[GrofLuigi]

...

Instead of turning this into a flamewar, I suggest you read the comments on the article. Although there is some of the usual Vista bashing, there are MANY valid points (that can also be presented as a reply to your reply. ) I guess that's because Mark blog is read by many technical people.

I'm not one of those people that need always to have the last word. If you want, we can continue the discussion through PM, (and I have a reply to every point you raise ), but, as I have said in another thread before, I see no point - both our minds are set towards opposite things and I doubt either would change his mind.

I see this thread as a healthy discussion, not as flaming, but I see no fruitful outcome. So... peace man!

Hmmm... on the other hand, wouldn't opening a sandbox on the forum with free flaming (Windows vs all others, XP vs Vista...) free the threads from repeating same things over and over again? :angrym:

GL

[CoffeeFiend]

I'm not one of those people that need always to have the last word.

Neither do I, but I sure do love to argument, and you could say I'm strongly opinionated on certain things

I see no point - both our minds are set towards opposite things and I doubt either would change his mind.

I see this thread as a healthy discussion, not as flaming, but I see no fruitful outcome. So... peace man!

You're certainly right on this one. We could throw it back and forth for just about forever without flaming, but I can't see myself change my mind over this, and seemingly not you either. So I think we can leave it at "agree to disagree" too.

[Tripredacus]

So far my SP1 experience has been very good. We don't actively use it yet, but we have finally gotten through our evaluation period and will adopt it very shortly. I have only had to use it twice, and in both instances, we used it to fix two issues we were having with hardware or software configs that weren't working properly with RTM. In both cases, the root cause of problem was sysprep, however.

[D_block]

After installing vista sp1 i noticed one main difference.

When i go into system properties (winkey +pause ) it says

windows ultimate edition

sp1

lol

thats all i got so far