Playing Music in Vista Drags Down Network Performance

[Lemur]

Not a good weekend for Windows Vista, I'm afraid. Turns out that sending audio signals to your sound card (or motherboard sound output) slows down Vista's network performance.

Here is the thread where the discovery was thrashed out. Naturally, Slashdot jumped into the fray. Microsoft's not-entirely-official response can be read here.

A lot of current speculation hinges on the idea that music playback triggers certain DRM alarms in the OS, which run online to do ... something. Others have evidence that it's strictly a call to the sound driver that slashes network throughput by up to 90%. Ouch.

From Microsoft:

• "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.”