Know Any Windows 8.1 File System Performance Tweaks?

[helmutcheese]

I used to disable those 2 setting and "lowdiskspace" in Vista but I was never sure if they actually gained anything lol.

[stfual]

I found this topic on search for Windows 8 FS tweaks. Ive seen some improvements on copy times to USB in Windows 8.1 which were horrible in windows 8 but the reverse on disk to disk copy. A music application I use is much slower on loading a song which accesses multiple small files than it used to be. I notice there are lots of tweaks for increasing file system caching on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and i'm wondering if any of these registry tweaks apply to windows 8 ?

What disappoints me greatly about Microsoft is how poor they are on providing tuning data and tools for disk and memory storage. In Windows 8.1 advanced performance properties tells me the recommended paging file is 5GB but it is set automatically to 16GB. There is no documentation i can find telling why that is recommended or set.

Being from a storage background its mostly just persistence. You just run the same application over and over again and tweak.

I get that there focus is on general performance reliablity and security but with Microsoft having a 100,000 employees worldwide having a small dedicated team of 10 focussed on performance tuning seem reasonable and sensible.

I would offer this to anyone who has upgraded a 'came with the operating system" laptop or desktop PC with a hard disk. These often come with a 20GB hidden manfacturer partition on the outside (fastest) part of the disk holding the OEM operating system and asssociated malware. This is wasted space once you upgrade to Windows 8. Why the manufacturers put this on the outside not the inside of the disk is it saves a few minutes on copy times in manufacturing. This saving costs customers in performance over the lifetime of the PC. While it is not a simple task for the uninitiated deleting this partition and making it available to windows 8 can add up to 20GB of the best performing part of the disk to you.

[epic]

Not so much a "performance," tweak, but have you tried reducing your SXS folder? Here's an easy guide (http://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-your-winsxs-folder-on-windows-7-or-8/), without me having to get into detail about it. Saved me 6GB of space; though, this ought to be AUTOMATIC during installation of Windows and part of Windows maintenance and yet it is not.

[NoelC]

Thank you, epic, but this was a fresh Windows 8.1 install from disc, and there have only been a limited number of Windows Updates since it came out. My WinSxS folder has 6 GB, but the Disk Cleanup tool shows it would only release 313 MB of storage.

But the amount of used storage isn't the issue here.

I have 800+ GB free on the SSD array - a little less than 50%. The real issue here is that somewhere inside the implementation of the NTFS file system there is a significant slowdown in Windows 8.1. It's not just a difference from Windows 7. I've since verified that slowdown has specifically appeared in Windows 8.1. Windows 8 and 7 can be measured to be similarly fast on equivalent systems (not my workstation but others). Windows 8.1 is a good bit SLOWER compared to Windows 8 - something I didn't expect.

I believe Microsoft deleted something that mattered to performance in their grand quest to hobble Windows. Thank God the bums that led the charge have all been thrown out. But how can they rescue the ruined culture at this point? Maybe we'll see something good again in 2017.

-Noel

P.S., I'm GLAD Microsoft doesn't have a bunch of "delete files" type maintenance activities they choose to do. I don't want them deleting my data! They actually DO do all too much of that already (e.g., from within the Windows.old folder, or "broken" shortcuts on the desktop).

Edited February 28, 2014 by NoelC

[HarryTri]

I also noticed that Windows 8.1 are slower than Windows 8 regarding disc operations, of course I don't know why.

My WinSxS folder has 6 GB, but the Disk Cleanup tool shows it would only release 313 MB of storage.

It would probably release much more space, partly because it compresses the WinSxS folder, but it will take some time the first time you run it (even hours). By the way does anybody else had the Disk Cleanup tool sticking to the "Temporary Files" for some time in Windows 8.1?

[epic]

Ramdrive

[NoelC]

HarryTri, you absolutely would not want to compress the contents of the WinSxS folder!

Epic, the disk cache functions just as a RAMDrive would once the data is read from the disk and cached. That's the point, even the reading of the data purely from RAM is 1/3 the speed of the same operation in Windows 7 or 8.

This problem is not going to yield to a simple "use it differently" type answer.

It will likely ultimately be solved by either a) a heretofore undiscovered tweak that returns some part of the file system implementation to what it was, or maybe b) a Windows Update that fixes some new problem they don't realize they introduced.

-Noel

[NoelC]

Out of curiosity, if you do as I mentioned in the first post, selecting all the files and folders in C:\, then right-clicking and choosing Properties, how many files per second does your system enumerate? Measure both the first and second tries.

-Noel

Edited March 3, 2014 by NoelC

[Soukyuu]

8648 files per second on first try, 14702 on the second... that's with a single crucial m4 ssd. So a bit slower than your raid setup. I never tested it with previous windows versions, but I must say I also never felt a slowdown moving from win7 to win8.1. So maybe it's one of those differences that only show up in benchmarks..?

[NoelC]

Thanks for checking.

It's difficult to feel a slowdown that measures in milliseconds, but yes, there's a definite slowdown - e.g., in starting File Explorer, or in programs that access a lot of files. For example, I have careful measurements of software system build times and other operations where tens of thousands of files are accessed. The change is felt as a change from something like 28 seconds to 34 seconds to do the same things.

That's not going to break the bank, but I'm not willing to accept that a new version of Windows can't do the same things just as quickly as the old. There's no evidence that there's more robustness in the file system or anything to justify a slowdown.

I haven't been able to get Microsoft to admit that it even exists, nor the storage driver people (HighPoint Global) who wrote the RAID driver. It's as though no one cares whether there's a difference between "blindingly fast" and "blazingly fast".

Thing is, some people pay a premium for the fastest possible performance. That Windows 8.1 throws that investment away does not sit well with me, and I want to know the reason.

-Noel

Edited March 3, 2014 by NoelC

[jaclaz]

Maybe connected, maybe not , the new "spot verification service" and the new "online self-healing" model:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/09/redesigning-chkdsk-and-the-new-ntfs-health-model.aspx

Also most probably unconnected, but there are hints that there is something changed at a "lower" level than the filesystem driver (at least when AF disks are involved):

http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=11431/postdays=0/postorder=asc/start=0/

Just for the record, it is not the first time (historically) that for mysterious reasons a filesystem driver (or however *something* influencing data access or transfer speed) is much slower than a previous release, even on a much simpler filesystem such as FAT16 or FAT32:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/125116-fat16-vs-fat32-vs-ntfs-speed-on-usb-stick/

and however there are so many "queer" behaviours when it comes to "real life" disk speed/access that I guess we could spend an entire lifetime doing tests each one of which will contradict the result of the earlier one.

And this time undoubtedly not connected, but a good example of how sometimes MS changes things (quite relevant) and says nothing about the changes, we have recent evidence that a TexFAT version 2.0 was introduced silently in Windows Phone 7 (or maybe 7.5):

http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=11393/

jaclaz

[NoelC]

You may be right that there's something hidden that's responsible for this. We can only hope it's a good thing. But It's not really reasonable to keep it a secret, then! I'm not the only one who cares about having to give up performance.

Briefly I held a secret hope that when Microsoft makes Windows capable of booting from a volume formatted with the new ReFS file system (which I have set up on one of my HDDs), things will get better. But no, I tested it. I can only enumerate files at the following rate (remembering that this is an HDD, not SSD, so the second number is more interesting)

• 1,500 files/second first time.
• 10,000 files/second after the data is cached.

By appearances, this is even slower than NTFS.

-Noel

P.S., Nothing is being logged in my event logs to indicate there are any problems with the volumes on my system.

Edited March 4, 2014 by NoelC

[HarryTri]

HarryTri, you absolutely would not want to compress the contents of the WinSxS folder!

I did with the Disk Cleanup tool and it took some hours (on Windows 8) but it gave about 2GB of disk space. If you imply that it may cause any problems I don't have any until now.

[NoelC]

If you've compressed files on disk that are needed for execution - for example, DLLs in WinSxS, then you will almost certainly have slowed down your system. There is some tradeoff between size of disk access and speed of CPU to decompress data, but practically speaking using file system compression slows things down in general, even on a very powerful computer system. Compression is an especially bad idea when using SSD. Most SSDs run worst on compressed data, because they attempt to compress it internally.

If you're struggling that hard to get back 2 GB of disk space, you should consider saving some pennies to get a bigger drive.

-Noel

[HarryTri]

Well, the difference in speed isn't sensible for an HDD, things may be different for an SSD. The Disc Cleanup tool compresses the WinSxS folder when it does the Windows Update cleanup anyway.