Vista is caught

[screwballl]

Taken from WServerNews (formerly W2Knews)

Slow Vista File Copy Nightmare Solved!

WSN Reader Nick's Vista Horror story in last issue has a follow-up. He wrote: "I MAY have finally turned the corner on Vista turning me gray and bald, although what little hair I have left after the last 4 weeks is definitely going gray :) I bought a MS Wireless Desktop 1000 to install on that Latitude ATG 620 with Vista Business that has been torturing me. Certified for Vista. Install Intellipoint 6.1 off the disk. Plug in the receiver. No joy. It wants the disk. Says the disk has no drivers. WTF. Download and install Intellipoint 6.2. Plug in the receiver. No joy. It wants the disk.

Now, we've been to 'Trinity and Beyond.' Where do we go from there? Chixulub asteroid impact? Call MS hardware support (They were good). Eventually discover that NO new hardware (i.e. thumb drives, wired keyboards, anything) will install. OK. Uninstall SP1. Install Intelli point 6.2 again and Lo! and behold! the hardware installs. Great.

Test the network response time without SP1. Now, there is nothing particularly old, creaky or obscure in my setup. I've got a PowerEdge 800 running SBS 2003 for a server and a Cisco SB2024 Gigabit switch. It took 5 MINUTES to copy a 61 MB file. Sigh. Install SP1 again. Hey, the hardware still works AND I can install other new hardware. It's a miracle. Test the network response time, again. Now it takes 40 seconds to copy that 61 MB file. XP only takes 8-10 seconds. It beats 5 minutes, but it still ain't great. So I start googling for post-SP1 slow-file-copy bug problems. Eventually, I come across a reference to Mark Minassi's blog that deals with the autotuning feature of the new TCP stack and that even relatively new switches and routers may not like the autotuning 'feature'. (SP1 by default undoes all the tweaking that poor bastards like me have been flailing away at to try and fix this EVIL.) So I enter the following into an Administrative cmd window:

C:\> netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Now I tried that pre-SP1 and it didn't make a darn bit of difference. But Lo and behold! The 61 MB file now comes down the pipe in 6 seconds. So I test pull the SP1 mega-executable from the server (434 MB) Takes 1 minute 34 seconds. Run the same test on XP. Takes 1 minute 53 seconds. It's a miracle. We still aren't smiling. Its been a full year, a service pack, and a command line tweak to get performance better than what XP had to offer. MS has burnt a lot of credibility with me with their utter silence on this issue--and how, if they eat their own dogfood, that this issue ever got out the door without being caught and killed. But there is light at the end of the Vista tunnel--and maybe all the hair I have pulled out will grow back in brown and not gray :)

[gvblake22]

Wow, that's insane. Those transfer times are not just improved by a little, that's night and day difference! Is this only when transferring files over a network or does this apply to file transfers on internal hard drives too?

[Smashing]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

Wow, that's insane. Those transfer times are not just improved by a little, that's night and day difference! Is this only when transferring files over a network or does this apply to file transfers on internal hard drives too?

Considering it is a network tweak I am going to have to say it only works on networks.

[screwballl]

theres the mention of pulling the SP1 executable from the server... not sure if that is his server or the MS server so it is hard to tell for sure... I suspect a LAN server

[stinger608]

transfered a 100mb file before the command line tweak and after.

before, 1min 3seconds

after, 47seconds!!!!

That little command line tweak helps a ton!

Oh yea, and that is transferring between 2 computers on the network

[dedgar]

Did a dl of Ubuntu (696mb file) without the tweak and took about 22.5 min.
Dl with the tweak and took about 6 min off the previous time, 16.7 min.
Looks like it works across the web too.

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

Sped up my transfers via network (700MB AVI file) by approximately 20 seconds.

Before: 1 min, 25 sec.
After: 1 min, 5 sec.

EDIT: Can you re-enable it to test differences? I tried typing in enabled and it didn't work

[screwballl]

IIRC... you have to restart after you enter this in for it to take effect

[theburan]

Yeah, this should only apply to network related transfers.

I love the netsh command though. One more reason to like it.

Too bad I didnt read this before I just spent forever downloading driver's from abit's website, lol.

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

Originally Posted by screwballl

IIRC... you have to restart after you enter this in for it to take effect

Actually, I noticed the difference without restarting...