Windows Vista - a cautionary tale

October 2007 News

Brian’s Brain blog

Brian Dippet, senior technical editor of EDN recently blogged about Windows Vista's audio stack. The following is an edited version of that blog:

In brief, Windows Vista significantly boosts the priority of audio processes as compared to other kernel- and application-level functions, and versus Microsoft O/S predecessors. As a result, networking performance can in some situations become degraded when you record, play or even pause an audio track. Although the magnitude of the degradation was somewhat shocking to me, that it can occur was not at all a surprise.

Why did Microsoft make this implementation decision? Steve Rowe, a test development lead at Microsoft and responsible for sound in Windows, explained:

Unfortunately, (the audio) scheduler is implemented in such a way that drivers can still pre-empt it. Some networking drivers were doing too much work all at once which caused audio to glitch. To avert this, the networking system was throttled. This did not cause much of an issue for ordinary (100 megabit) networking cards and no issue at all for Internet usage (which is usually

<= 5 mbps) but did cause a noticeable drop in performance for gigabit networking cards.

To find out more about this visit Brian's blog at www.edn.com/blog/400000040.html

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