WTF is up with Vista's piss poor file transfer rates???

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Freezebyte

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Ok, i've been pretty patient with my first time around with Vista since Oct of last year after I built my new SFF gaming system. Its been well behaved and hardly given me issues, except what is fucking up with file transfers on this OS? I have seen better transfer rates from HDD to a farking floppy disc in comparison to my USB2.0 sticks!! I kid you not, it takes a good damn 5 minutes just to move 1 gig across either direction!

And then theirs the network file transfers, holy God in heaven it sucks!! I have a full Cat 6E wiring to a 3COM switch downstairs to m HTPC attached to my D-Link 4300 and it always ran awesome on my older Windows XP machine. But recently, after trying to move 300-700meg video files from my BitTorrent machine to my HTPC, my transfers rates crawl at 120-200 kbytes a sec???!!!

I"ve done as much googling as I can on this issue including turning off a few options in Windows programs area, but nothing has helped! Can anyone else shed light on this issue before I decided to start burning DVDs and moving my files that way, cause its sure a helluva faster!!

Iv'e checked my ethernet wiring which around 40 feet going from upstairs to downstairs. I reterminated the ends nice and tight and neat, so I know its not the cable. My HTPC is running MCE 2005 and I can transfers files freaking blinding fast between that and my girlfriends XP dell laptop, even at just 100mbps, so its narrowed down to my Vista machine.

I'm not running any software firewall crap either, just free AVG 8.0, even the Windows firewall is all turned off.
 
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Have you installed the service packs? It fixed the transfer rate on mine.
 
Can't help here, always been able to do roughly 60MB/s between my Vista machines. Roughly 10MB/s using USB2.0 flash drives.
 
Yeah, same here. Slow as heck. What's worse is that the file transfer rates are actually WORSE when transferring from disk to disk on the SAME SYSTEM using the exact same hard drives. :rolleyes:
 
Not sure about your large file transfer speed problems, but small file transfers to some USB sticks can be painfully slow. There was a limitation pre-patch/pre-SP where playing media at the same time as transferring slowed down network speed.

I have a bog standard install of Vista x64 (no tweaks, but fully updated) and both my Ethernet and USB transfer speeds are fine. Ethernet transfer speed over gigabit is ~70-75MB/s. Transfer to 2 different USB drives are ~15MB/s write and ~20MB/s write, with faster read speeds than that (close to rated speeds on both).
 
Are both machines running Vista, or is one Vista and one XP?

Is the transfer rate slow in both directions, or is it slow in one direction and fast in another? (over the network)

For whatever Vista PC is going slow, are you using the default windows NIC driver or the manufacturer's? (use the latter)
 
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Ritorix said:
Are both machines running Vista, or is one Vista and one XP?

Is the transfer rate slow in both directions, or is it slow in one direction and fast in another? (over the network)
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I haven't tried moving files from the HTPC XP machine to the Vista one. Be curious to see what that does....
 
Ritorix said:
Are both machines running Vista, or is one Vista and one XP?

Is the transfer rate slow in both directions, or is it slow in one direction and fast in another? (over the network)

For whatever Vista PC is going slow, are you using the default windows ethernet driver or the manufacturer's? (use the latter)
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No, I loaded with the most current Intel chipset drivers when I built the machine, its a ASUS P5E-HDMI VM mATX board, though the gigabit NIC is Atheros
 
Theres a lot it could be. Duplex speed on the NIC (auto/10/100/etc) getting auto-negotiated instead of set to something, or maybe remote differential compression (RDC) is enabled on Vista, etc.
 
I've noticed vista severely degrades network performance when I've been streaming my mp3s across from my file server, although to be fair that's just a guess. I haven't done a great deal to isolate the mp3s as the problem.

It's a "feature". Although it seemed to work fine in xp...
 
XOR != OR said:
I've noticed vista severely degrades network performance when I've been streaming my mp3s across from my file server, although to be fair that's just a guess. I haven't done a great deal to isolate the mp3s as the problem.

It's a "feature". Although it seemed to work fine in xp...
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That actually is (was? supposed to have been fixed) a feature. Forgot about that one.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.02.vistakernel.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684247.aspx

MMCSS, which is implemented in %SystemRoot%\System32\Mmcss.dll and runs in a Service Host (Svchost.exe) process, has a priority-management thread that runs at priority 27. (Thread priorities in Windows range from 0 to 31.) This thread boosts the priority of registered multimedia threads into the range associated with the Scheduling Category value of their task's registry key blah blah blah...poor design.

Last edit: russinovich did do an article on this, thought so...
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
mark said:
(he describes how crappy audio can be when it gets interrupted by network code)...MMCSS’ glitch-resistant mechanisms were therefore extended to include throttling of network activity. It does so by issuing a command to the NDIS device driver, which is the driver that gives packets received by network adapter drivers to the TCP/IP driver, that causes NDIS to “indicate”, or pass along, at most 10 packets per millisecond (10,000 packets per second).

Because the standard Ethernet frame size is about 1500 bytes, a limit of 10,000 packets per second equals a maximum throughput of roughly 15MB/s. 100Mb networks can handle at most 12MB/s, so if your system is on a 100Mb network, you typically won’t see any slowdown. However, if you have a 1Gb network infrastructure and both the sending system and your Vista receiving system have 1Gb network adapters, you’ll see throughput drop to roughly 15%.
Click to expand...
 
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Simply deleting items from the desktop is what annoys me...I can count the zeros and ones out loud faster than it can delete them. Technically deleting a file is really just a transfer....from source folder to recycle bin folder.
 
bigdogchris said:
Customize windows components and uninstall remote differential compression

Also, try disabling the TCP/IP auto tuning. It's supposed to help when there is a lot of network traffic but your by yourself. http://www.speedguide.net/faq_in_q.php?qid=247

Also, you may need to raise the TCP/IP limit (half-open patcher) http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/...tcher-for-x86-and-x64-windows-7-vista-and-xp/ (new value of 100 should be good)
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Did the remote diff compr already, no diff. I'll try the auto tune and limit.

Eh, that TCP/limit hack worries me, think I"ll leave that alone
 
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I have found that sometimes Moving files is slower than just Copying them, so I'll just copy them to the destination and then delete them from the source.
 
yea, i get the same transfer rates, took me FOREVER to copy user files..
 
I just copied 1.7GB disk to disk in about 30 seconds vista x64 sp2 are you having network only problems?
 
I dunno man I get 2000-3000K a sec over my wireless connection so it might be a driver issue or a router problem.....
 
why dont you try setting up an ftp connection then see what speeds you get via that
 
you could even try running xcopy to see if that speeds up the rate
 
Vista is the first OS I've used that seems generally incapable of copying files. On release it was dreadful (click cancel, watch the OS crash) but it has gotten better since SP1. I sometimes am able to hit up to 60MB/sec over network but sometimes it seems that this only happens when the planets are aligned properly. Same hardware under XP, Ubuntu, RHEL copy over the network fast and efficiently.

I would advise Win7, not one of Vista's... "quirks" regarding file transfers seem to be present in Win7. Copying and moving both are fast, and this is true from drive to drive, drive to USB, or drive to/from network share. Even network share to network share seems pretty quick. Running multiple copies at once doesn't bring Explorer to its knees. It's free for almost a year and the time savings in not having to troubleshoot things or run through tweak site recommendations is worth the time to download the ISO and do the install.
 
I have had the same problems as you list above.

If I try to copy 5-10gb worth of 350mb files, Vista will either take hours to copy from one drive to another, or the OS will crash.

I have tried all of the latest service packs with no help.

The other issue I ran across is using the Firefox Add On DownThemAll to download files, each file would start and lock up Vista for 2-3 mins.

My only guess is that this is being caused by me having mixed SATA 1 and SATA 2 drives.

The odd thing is, everything works perfect under Windows XP and Windows 7
 
Couple of things that should help you out...

1. Make sure you have IPv6 turned off in Vista, this tends to cause all kinds of issues within Networks, and just plain old surfing.

2. Check and double check your Network cables, a lot of issues could be caused by poor cables. When in doubt, get yourself 100' of Cat5e cables (like $20 at Frys), and connect your systems that way to verify there isn't a problem with your network cables.

3. Make sure your Router has up-to-date firmware. A sometimes forgotten element that can cause issues.

4. Also, if your using a Motherboard based NIC, that you have the latest BIOS installed. Just like a Router, this is something thats often forgetten.
 
Couple more things I've found...

Check this out...
Vista has an inbuilt feature that reserves 80% of bandwidth for media streaming across a network, sadly even if you are not listening to music across the network it will still spare 80%.

If i have itunes open vista wont pass 11.5mbps/ With itunes closed i get up to 65mbp/s.
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Oh, you also might want to turn off your AV just for the file transfer, to see if that has any affect. I've had issues with Avast and McAfee causing file transfers over the network to slow down when either of these programs were turned on.

One last thing, is check to see if your Motherboard has two NIC's. If it does, try connecting to the second NIC and see if the problem remains. If you do think its a NIC problem, go buy an Intel Gigabit NIC (Think they are around $10) and try it out.
 
I can't believe this has not been mentioned yet. Vista has a 'feature' that automatically throttles network bandwith whenever multimedia is being played on a computer. It throttles it down to 10% (although it can be worse) so that multimedia will not be interrupted on slow computers. There is a registry key that controls the throttle.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\
Name : NetworkThrottlingIndex
Value type : DWORD
Value data : From integer 1 through integer 70 (Decimal) (Decimal)

More info here

I hope this helps. Its an easy fix and always baffled me.
 
Doubt it'll help. That feature is only noticable when you're using gigabit networks as it limits you to ~12.5MB/s, not 150Kb/s as the OP says.
 
my big problem has been for the last few days transfering stuff to/from my usb drives has been going at like 5-8MB/sec and not the normal 30MB/sec. network transfers are fine but the internal HD to usb drive is painfuly slow.
 
I have had this problem twice since vista.Once was caused by my anti virus.I turned it off and it copied over perfect and my spped rates were back.The only other time this happened to me was because of
Windows vista’s ‘remote differential compression. I disabaled this and it started back working like a charm.
 
MR_PERFECT said:
I have had this problem twice since vista.Once was caused by my anti virus.I turned it off and it copied over perfect and my spped rates were back.The only other time this happened to me was because of
Windows vista’s ‘remote differential compression. I disabaled this and it started back working like a charm.
Click to expand...

sorry for the late bump, but i just have to say thanks for the info on the
remote differential compression. i just disabled it and things are slow no more...ahh the things you never think about or learn wtf they do.
 
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