Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category
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Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
I’m currently moving about a whole bunch of smaller files in Windows 7 (about 400,000 files). I was getting frustrated with the abysmal rate at which Windows is able to move files around. Even moving just one folder into another one causes Explorer to start “discovering” the entire source dir, which is utterly pointless in the first place as there’s just one node to consider and to relink in the MFT. One wonders why it always does that. It didn’t do so before Vista.
Anyway – adding injury to insult, these files need to be imported in and processed by an application which is rather poorly written, making it run out of memory when it is fed much more than 4,000 files at a time. So, I have to move batches of about 4,000 files into separate folders before importing them, and to do this I have to use Explorer. The move operations, as mentioned, are incredibly slow, maxing out at 25 items per second, sometimes dropping to 5 items/sec, generally hovering at about 15 items/sec. I was wondering if the problem was the files lists in the source and target Explorer windows being continually refreshed as items were moved in and out of them, and so tried to navigate away from them, even closing the windows entire, without effect.
Then, by accident, I discovered that if I selected a batch of files from the bottom of the list in the source window, the move operation was massively faster, running at 350-500 items/sec! That’s a performance factor of ~ 14 to 100, in other performing, compared to the previous runs, at between 1,400% and 10,000% effectiveness. Go figure!
Not having access to the Windows source code, one can only guess at what kind of code disaster lies behind this behavior. But regardless, remembering this trick can prove very helpful when you don’t feel like spending an entire day looking a green bars very slowly moving east.
These issues, and the effect of this trick, seem to happen according to Windows’ current mood, though. Sometimes you get to drag-and-drop a folder with 200,000 files into another folder instantly, at other times it’ll spend 30 seconds examing a 100-file folder. Similarly, sometimes (about 1 in 4 so far) the forementioned trick has no effect, and you’re looking at green bars again. Your mileage may vary
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Leaked Screenshot of Windows Server 9 Login Screen, In-UI Annotations new Design Strategy
Whoah…! Today is a great one for me as an individual, and for the Windows community as a whole.
It’s been an amazing couple of months! Windows 7, as it seems, will soon – or sometime, anyway – be surpassed by its successor, Windows 8. This has been disclosed officially by Microsoft, discussed all over the net, and various leaks of functionality and design have been discovered and forwarded to the interwebs, mostly about the Windows 8 Login Screen.
As anyone with half a brain knows, the most important part – feature-wise – of an operating system, and also the hardest to fake if you were to do that, is the login screen! Especially with regards to Windows, as on an average day, this is the place you’ll be spending most of your time.
Well. Santa’s got something in his stocking for you!!! Working closely together with a close friend of mine “behind the fence” so to speak (who shall remain unnamed), I’ve acquired a great deal of info on something very astounding. Even now, months before the release of Windows 8, and years before the release of the next iteration of the Redmond series, I am in the fortunate position to be able to reveal a couple of goodies to you. For one, the successor to Windows 8 will be named “Windows 9″!!!
Secondly, in what seems as a big-brotherly shoulderpat and comradery “get-well” gesture from Microsoft to the daredevils of Europe, the codename has an Icelandic ring to it, specifically “Eönghörn”.
And as if that isn’t enough to get your panties shaking, I’ve even managed to acquire a leaked and very very hush-hush screenshot of the login screen of Windows 9. This is even from Windows Server 9, and shows an entirely new strategy in interface design – helping the user by using in-screen annotations, explaining all those things that are usually really hard to fathom to the average Windows Server administrator.
These are great times, indeed, and if I were Canonical or Apple, I’d be shitting my pants! Wouldn’t you?
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Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?
So, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants me to buy the “Humble Bundle” – a pay-what-you-think-is-fair financed bundle of computer games. Not only that, but you get a choice of who to pay, too.
I went to the site and started reading – primary concern being, of course, “will it run on Linux?” I scrolled down and a pie chart caught my eye. The statistics for the previous Humble Bundle installment. An event that apparently resulted in the raising of $500,000 to EFF:
Now, while Windows as a platform is the largest contributor, per user paying it’s also the smallest one, as you can see by the average purchase price by platform to the left. Actually, on average, a Linux user has coughed up about three times the amount a Windows user has. And about twice as much as the average Mac user.
Now, why is that? Well, I’d like to think that we’re just better people, but that would be stretching it a bit
Either way, with more than 132,000 purchases it’s damn hard to dismiss as statistical error. Given that any PC these days is hard to get without Windows pre-installed, it’s not like we have the extra money left to spend that we didn’t use on the OS. What do you think? -
Stacking Turds – Or How I Learned that Homeless People are More Fortunate than ASP.NET Professionals
DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to read may contain harsh language. It contains stories of feces-throwing gorillas and crying children. Opinions will be biased. Proceed at your own risk!
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Getting Cleartype to Work with WINE and Winetricks
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably frustrated that the usual hints and tricks to enable sub-pixel hinting, i.e. “cleartype” in Redmond terms, under WINE is usually futile.
The problem often is that the default Windows XP font is Tahoma, and this font isn’t included with WINE. So even if you have enabled cleartype, Tahoma will render using some fallback system font without subpixel hinting.
Solution? Just install tahoma. Example, installing uTorrent with winetricks:
env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-utorrent winetricks utorrent fontfix fontsmooth-rgb tahoma
There ya go
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Windows 7 Rants, Part 2: Abandoning Linux, Network Performance, and Bye-Bye Redmond (Back in the Fold)
In my previous post I gave Windows 7 quite a beating. If you’ve read anything that even resembles a review on my blog, it should be pretty apparent by now that if I muster up the effort to get behind the keyboard and actually express my opinion about something, it’s usually because I hate it. That’s not to say I hate everything, just think of it this way: if I’m not publicly dissing it, I love it
I didn’t bash your favorite movie? It’s because it’s the best… movie… ever!Anyway, obviously I’m writing about something right now, so obviously I hate it. Yup, it’s my battle with Windows, Windows 7 this time. If you read the previous installment, you’ll know that I was using Windows 7 as it came with my newly purchased ASUS laptop. Since then I’ve had the unfortunate experience that my workstation at work (Kubuntu Karmic) had grown exceedingly quirky. As in the same crap I ranted about last time with disk IO being prioritized so highly that even moving the mouse wasn’t possible when files were being moved about. Install a kernel update, and forget about using the computer for several minutes. That kind of prioritization. Add to that that at an otherwise critical point in time (we were moving servers) my Eclipse PDT install started completely barfing on PHP5.3, the new VPN solution in our company didn’t work with any Kubuntu installment since Feisty, and Firefox started crashing on every file upload, attempt to use Firebug, and attempt to use our time-tracking software’s web interface (which is a study in WTFs, by the way, so I can’t really blame it). Google results mentioned incompatibilities between 64-bit Linuxes and current Firebug, and I seriously needed to use the VPN as I had to work from at home during the weekend. All in all, it seemed like there was really not a lot of options. I turned my head and asked my colleague if perhaps there was an extra Windows 7 Professional license I could use.
Now this may seem like nothing special, but for me it was quite tragic, really. I hate a lot of things, and I do hate computers and OSes in particular (great career choice then, eh?), and I really hate OS fan boys regardless of their color and shape, because to be honest: All OSes suck. I just found Linux to suck the least, and adding to that, when it sucks, it’s always because of a legimate bug, a technical shortcoming or a missing piece of software. It’s never the Apple way of “you’ll take what we give you, and only what we give you, up the ass and you’ll look trendy while you smile” or the Microsoft one of “we don’t care if it’s the simplest task ever invented, we will easily turn it into the most intertwined, non-standard, and complicated equivalent, then we’ll make it partly work and give you a billion irrelevant and incomprehensible options to configure it, minus the ones that you actually need, oh, and we’ll fix the bugs once we’re finished making new software”. With Linux, I’ve always felt completely free and empowered, no matter what crappy thing made me shout at my monitor in frustration.
So, really, making this decision felt utterly awful, I may sound like a drama queen, but my girlfriend can attest to the fact that I was literally depressed following that. But, you win some, you lose some, and so I ventured back into Redmond from whence long ago I so joyfully departed.
Oh, such a long introduction such a short story!
Well, if it’s a rant, it’s a rant But, that was the story of my abandoning Linux on my workstation at work, let’s get to the next part: The bitching about Windows 7. This time: Network performance.Let’s see… Any Eclipse user out there knows that the IDE is quite fond of messing about with files in its projects. It’s a necessity for doing all the wonderful things it does in the background, such as validating your code, analyzing it to offer magical code assist features, and all sorts of funky stuff that makes it just that bit more fun to be a developer. Also, being a web developer, I’m pretty sure I won’t be the first of my kind to be having his or her project code on a network share, as a local installation of LAMP will rarely suffice as the backbone of a development environment.
This means that there’s gonna be a whole lot of network traffic going on when a developer of my breed is working in Eclipse (or any equivalent derivate, for that matter). Which also means that network performance is pretty crucial for being productive. You can’t afford to wait too long for your searches, saves, loads, check ins and outs, whatever, to complete, or your groove is gonna be seriously disturbed.
At first I didn’t notice the problems with networking in Windows 7. I had to move a lot of documents from my XFS partition to my NTFS drive, and I did that by way of a network share, since I had to clear out my /home partition to be able to increase the size of the NTFS partition so that there was actually room for all my files there. Obviously Windows doesn’t access XFS partitions. It’s a gigabit tether, so putting them up there went at the speed of my aging 2.5″ HDD, and getting them back went pretty fast, too, nothing made me wonder at that time.
It seems, though, that this was mainly because of the size of the files. Moving large files in Windows 7 to or from a network share is sufficiently fast (like 15-20 MBps, not the 30-something that Kubuntu provided, but still plenty speed for what you need a network share for in the first place). It’s when you start juggling small files that things start to smell, well, …fishy…
Now, what is typically the nature of files in a programming project directory? That’s right, they’re small. Like <10k. And then there’s the subversion metafiles, tons of stuff in each .svn directory. You really need a network stack capable of pushing those babies through like slugs from a minigun. Well, maybe I’ve spoiled in Linux, but I really don’t think so – my other OS X colleagues don’t feel spoiled either, when we pull 710 MB of these small files from the network share in 6½ minutes. Or when a fresh Subversion checkout takes 1-2 minutes tops. Or “Refreshing workspace” completes in 15 seconds.
To tell the truth, I’ve actually been kinda pissed about that kind of delays. I even wrote a PHP script based on inotify that enabled me to keep a local copy of my projects which were mirrored onto the network share transparently and on-the-fly triggered by file changes. Something that Microsoft actually made some kind of implementation of in Windows 7, called “Transparent Caching”. Except it doesn’t work. Wonder if I should mail them my script?
Anyway, my jaw slowly (very slowly) dropped to the floor when I checked out ~3MB of project files from SVN in Eclipse on my fresh Windows 7 installation and it took more than two hours. Following that, I tried copying the same 710 MB of development files as mentioned before, and Explorer’s finish estimate just continued to climb. The time used to stat the directories was more than 10 minutes, and the transfer speed once it finished that ranged from 11 kBps to 20-something kBps. I soon killed the process and attempted a 7-zip “Store” operation on the directory, as I’ve previously experienced extremely crappy transfer speeds with early Vistas and USB drives which were caused by Explorer, and alleviated when using either a command prompt or 7-zip or any other 3rd party application. I let it run for awhile until it seemed pretty certain that the process would take 7 hours, give or take a few minutes. 7 hours. Compare that to the 6½ minutes in Kubuntu, and I suddenly understood why my 3MB checkout in Eclipse took more than two hours.
Obviously, something was very wrong, and I started googling for solutions. Lots of posts by other users with exactly the same problem, or with the same sort of problem only related to external devices. My return to searching for solutions to problems with Windows just brought me back to a long-forgotten hell hole. People asking legitimate questions about legitimate problems with their crappy Redmond-based OS being met by fan boy idiots telling them that Microsoft isn’t at fault for their hardware vendors not providing proper drivers, idiots suggesting them to format and reinstall… WTF? I thought that was a joke by now?
I tried all the shebangs, disabling all kinds of crap, uninstalling antivirus software, upgrading my network adapter drivers from the vendor, but to no avail. Then I tested my colleague’s computer, and it exhibited the exact same problem. It became apparent to me that Windows definitely still wasn’t ready for the desktop, and I kinda went into a dark place where I had to find some kind of solution besides Windows or Linux, and so I tried to install FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Both would either kernel panic when booting the installation CDs (both were FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE based, so I guess the problem lies there somewhere), or continue (seemed to happen if I didn’t interact with the computer unless absolutely required, go figure). PC-BSD would fuck up my partition table, recreating every partition it touched resulting in “partition does not end on a cylinder boundary” warnings from fdisk, and it would always fail at some point in the installation with errors. Both, however, would succeed in installing as such, only their boot loaders would leave me with some weird prompt because it couldn’t find the boot code. Sucks.
So, to finish up… What I did was go back to where I’ve never been really let down, and that was with Kubuntu. I knew by experience that the Karmic Koala wouldn’t help me even if bribed with lots of eucalyptus leaves, so I got the Lucid Lynx Alpha 2 cd and tried that instead. Seriously beta. Well, no, not even that as it’s alpha, but still seriously beta
Either way, it failed to install grub, so I had to go with LILO. I also switched back from XFS to my old friend ReiserFS. Let me tell you: Either the Linux kernel just got a serious refurbishing or all my troubles with user responsiveness are really founded in XFS. Because the Lucid Lynx on ReiserFS is faster and more responsive than any OS I’ve ever tried. No more stutters with the mouse or interface, even when mirrordir’ing 12 GB to my drive while installing 470+ updates via apt-get. Not… one… Everything felt like a rocket had been shoved into my old laptop’s bong hole. I’m gonna try installing with XFS and Reiser on my own laptop and do some comparisons, so that I can maybe confirm (hopefully) that the responsiveness issues I’ve been experiencing over the last few years are to blame on XFS, not the kernel. That would make the next post indeed Either way, that’s my rant for now. Hope it was waaayyy to long for ya
Recent Posts
- Creating Missing Keyboard Shortcuts in Applications on Mac OS X
- Get Back /var/log/messages in (K)ubuntu 11.04
- Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
- Leaked Screenshot of Windows Server 9 Login Screen, In-UI Annotations new Design Strategy
- Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?
