Windows Vista SP1 outperforms Windows XP SP2 in file copy

Posted By: Michael Kleef [MSFT] | May 20th, 2008 @ 12:22 AM | 17,437 Views | 23 Comments

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Its interesting that people seem to think that Vista underperforms in every area of the system which is quite an incorrect perception. In this demo I show how Vista outperforms Windows XP and I show the under the covers process traces of just how it achieves it.
Demo environment consists of two images. One Vista SP1 and the other Windows XP SP2 both on the same HDD IO and communicating across my home wireless network to a Windows Server 2008 box on my main LAN. Once the two images get going latency gets introduced and things start to slow down....except Vista doesnt slow down. Watch and see!

Tags: performance, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Rating:

RolandAkesson

I tried this:
Computer A 4 years old Dell with Windows XP SP2, Intel 2200 wireless card
Computer B new Dell with Vista and without SP1, Broadcom wireless card.
Computer C new HP with Vista with and without SP1, Broadcom wireless card.
Computer D new Dell with Vista with and without SP1, Intel 3945ABG

I copied 22000 files (18000 relatively small) and folders with 145Mb from the server to the computer one at a time.

I used a wireless AP Netgear WG102 connected to a LAN and a Windows 2003 server where I had the files.

The AP was 25 meters away with 3 walls between the AP and the computers.

Results:
A : 5 minutes
B and C without SP1: 25 minutes!
B and C with SP1: 19 minutes!
D without SP1: 18 minutes
D with SP1: 13 minutes

When I connected the 4 years old Dell with XP2 to 100Mbit LAN the time was: 2min 50s

As you can see: SP1 makes the computers copy files faster but it is a long way to XP with SP2 - I have not tested SP3 yet.

How can I make the Vista computers to go faster? It´s a long way to the speed of XP!

mkleef

In reply to TheQuestor

#May 26th, 2008 @ 1:07 PM

Its interesting youre saying the file dialog disappears while the HDD light keeps going. Thats correct not only for Vista SP1 but also for XP. In XP the cache manager still flushes data to disk long after the copy dialog disappears. In Vista RTM we dismissed the copy dialog after the last block was written to disk, which while was more accurate, gave the impression that it was much much slower.

mkleef

In reply to Pedro Lino

#Jun 2nd, 2008 @ 4:47 AM

The goal here was to show it in a branch scenario where latency and contention is involved. This was an area that SMB 1 and the old TCP/IP stack in XP just couldnt keep up. I have done a similar exercise going across a 3G network with latency and recorded each independently copying while VPN'd into my server. The results are much the same.

mkleef

In reply to vIQtor

#Jun 5th, 2008 @ 3:00 AM

The copy estimation is one of the things people complained a lot about in Vista RTM. Im sure you sure the estimates of thousands of days to complete the file copy in Vista RTM and laughed about it right?? Smiley

My point in that instance was to show that XP doesnt really do much better, especially when in a latent environment.

The end result though showed two things:
1. In a latent network (branch) environment Vista SP1 copied faster
2. It was more accurate in estimating the time to complete than even XP was

APC did exactly what you are asking in file copy comparisons in this article http://apcmag.com/vista_sp1_up_to_86_faster.htm

danieln

Forget copying files over a network I just want to be able to copy files from a CD. I have a two month old laptop running Vista Home Premium and I am trying to copy 130 files (380MB) from a cd. It takes about 15 minutes then I get device IO errors and copys maybe 70 files. I put the CD in my other computer running XP and it copies the files fine in about 5 minutes and that computer was busy compressing 600 MB worth images, playing music and letting me search for and eventually finding this article.

If Vista cannot perform the most basic of operations, read, write and delete it should not be used.