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Some users which embraced the new OS by Microsoft have encountered a new issue. It seems that whenever multimedia is played, the network performance is slightly decreased.

The scenario: play some mp3′s in your favorite player and in meantime download something from a computer in the local network or if you have a high bandwith connection, download something from the internet. If one watches the download speed, one would notice that the download speed increases by about 10% if the player is stopped (not paused). This suggests that somewhere there is a connection betwen network and sound. Strange isn’t it?!

Well Microsoft has responed to this issue and apparently both network and sound drivers are running with very high priviledges within Vista. The sound driver still gets a higher priority in order to avoid sound jutter and thus the network driver has less processor time thus decreasing it’s total processing power.

I totally agree with the design but my question is: how in the nine hells can you encounter this scenario? I mean in order for the drivers to lose processing time is for the processor to have high occupancy, i.e. having it at around 80% and in this case I fully expect some of the subsystems to have degraded performance. And yeah, losing 10% of network speed isn’t that much of an issue, only maybe when you are acting as a server for some network enabled application, but in this case why would you play mp3′s on that computer?! it’s a server!

You can see a more detailed explanation from Microsoft here.

Ohh, and don’t forget in September Windows Vista SP1 beta gets released. Hopefully this will improve the performance and compatibility of the OS.

Cheers!

Update: A friend of mine sent me this link where Mark Russinovich is dissecting this “by design issue”