63 ms·

Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

406 points by pcr910303 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
This exactly mirrors my experience. "Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.
- the-dude 5y ago
  How is stopping these days? I seem to remember there were about 79 reasons why Windows might not shutdown.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    The only issue I've had with stopping is when it decides to update, and just hangs there with a completion percentage and the message "This could take a while." I almost always end up holding down the power button because it'll sit on the same percentage, sometimes 100%, for hours.
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    that happens to coincide with the 79 ways to "power off" windows.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    My main complaint is all the programs that think all your documents are so precious that they refuse to shut down. Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI
  - zlynx 5y ago
    I have a Windows virtual machine that was doing this to me a lot, and making Ubuntu reboots take a long time, and then requiring a disk check after the unclean shutdown. I found a registry key that tells Windows to force stop apps that block shutdown. I may lose an unsaved document once in a while but I would have lost it anyway, and I am pretty good about saving things when necessary. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop AutoEndTasks REG_SZ 1
  - herbst 5y ago
    That vm I shut down last week, probably still is shutting down. Hope this answers your question
- zlynx 5y ago
  Not counting BIOS time it is about 5 seconds to Windows login on my Windows with NVMe systems. It does take about 20 seconds after login for it to finish loading all of the tiny startup notification icons, but that's actually intentional by Windows so it does not overload and prevent you from launching the apps you want. After login I can click on the web browser or email and it will launch instantly for me. If you are doing a lot of waiting look into getting an SSD for your boot drive. Or you're running some kind of corporate security product that is going to a remote server for "Mother, may I launch this?" on every EXE and DLL.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    The point is, why does OP need to spend money on an SSD (and create e-waste in the process) when an HDD used to be reasonably fast for the same task?
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      I have an SSD for a boot drive on my personal and work computers. Both go out for lunch for long periods of time. It might be me. I know my reaction time is 35% faster than my teenage son. I am much more bothered by latency than other people, I'm starting to think that I experience more time than other people. I can't stand playing single-player games on a Samsung TV that isn't in game mode. The sloppy response drains out all my fun. When I was playing League of Legends on a "gaming" laptop I found I couldn't ever win (not feel like I was floundering, attacks hitting me and i couldn't do anything about, people avoiding my attacks 100% of the time) until I attached an external monitor. I took movies and could show the timer was 30 ms late on the internal monitor compared to the internal monitor. Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me. The average person who walks into a museum will be able to tell you which paintings they like, and which they do not. An art historian, however, will be able to tell you why they like certain paintings, and discuss specific details in the composition. You are like the art historian. When you play a game on a laggy TV, you can tell that the TV's latency is making the game worse. A layperson just finds the game less engaging, and doesn't know that it could be better, much less why.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  I have an old windows machine for playing WoW not happy with the Linux methods, but some day... and it does not have an SSD. I found one thing that helped was to disable a lot of the logging. In powershell on an administrator account: wevtutil el then select some or all of the logs to disable with wevtutil sl {logname} /e:false Another improvement since I only use it for WoW was to disable the spectre mitigations [1] remove some bloat with bleachbit [2] and then defragment the drive. Windows 10 specifically can be sped up a little bit by disabling some of the telemetry that is hidden away using O&O ShutUp10 [3] and improving network latency a little bit with the TCP/IP optimizer [4] as some startup applications rely on a response from servers. Now it starts up the same as when it was new. Maybe some day I will get a SSD. Another thing I found useful for Windows 10 was to disallow applications from running in the background which just "Suspends" applications rather than quitting. Suspending still takes up memory and pagefile. It's easier to see this in Process Explorer [5] I think they do this to mimic the behavior of a cell phone. Disabling suspending is less useful for startup time and more useful if you value your free memory. One more thing I should add that helped was to cache DNS on my home network. [1] - https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm [2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/ https://www.bleachbit.org/ [3] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 [4] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php [5] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    ... and you know I am always looking in the log and they are filled with stuff that seems irrelevant but never anything that explains why your computer crashed, why a service quit working, etc -- generally opening the event viewer seems to be a complete waste of time that I never get insights from. Disabling the log completely doesn't seem like a loss at all. As for the DNS I agree with that. Years ago when I first got DSL (1Mbps) I noticed that the browsing the web on a DSL line was slower than the dialup because DNS lookups took forever. Switching to a resolving DNS server was like taking a ton of bricks out of my car and installing a supercharger. I wonder if ISPs are just indifferent to DNS speed or if they see it as a form of "traffic shaping" that lowers load on their network.
fuzzy2 5y ago
Would be interesting how much worse it is if you upgrade in-place. Or is that what this test did? Overlaying SPECTRE etc. mitigations could also provide some insight.
boba7 5y ago
Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?
- seniorThrowaway 5y ago
  I have an older laptop with an hdd. It always was under powered but still usable for things like streaming to a tv every once in a while. The latest Win10 updates have it taking minutes to run a search or context switch. Feels like we are getting into phone territory of forced HW upgrades for everything now.
  - boba7 5y ago
    I'm upgrading computers in my University with 8GB of ram and ssd and poof, 2011 computers run W10 just fine once again.
    - smhenderson 5y ago
      This was my experience as well updating computers at a company I recently joined. Changing to an SSD had the most impact, although a lot of these machines already had 8GB of RAM. There are still a handful around that now have an SSD but still 4GB of RAM they came with; these are also better now, usable anyway.
      - at-fates-hands 5y ago
        My company did the same thing a while back. I remember two years ago having to get in the office at least 20 minutes before my z book laptop would fully boot. They upgraded all the developer grade laptops with 32GB of RAM and SSD's. Still take a good 5-8 mins to boot, but compared to where they were? Light years better!
    - asdff 5y ago
      I did this to all my family members macbook pros a few years ago, back when apple let you do that sort of thing to your hardware. These machines are 10 years old and still running modern stuff just fine.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
At what point does Windows 10 cross into what people would generally call "unstable software" and call Microsoft's classification of "stable release" as being way too low a bar?
haunter 5y ago
On my current gaming PC (i7-7700) I have installed W10 in 2017 and... no problem whatsoever? SSD, 10s boot. idk how do people end up with all the problems. I'm really curious because there must be an underlying reason
- LarryDarrell 5y ago
  I think the Startup Processes really gets abused and people default to blame Windows for it. My time to a usable desktop seemed slow until I removed Teams, Steam, Dropbox and some other update utilities from Startup. Now it's pretty much instant.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    I keep mine startup fairly clean and this is key to a 'fast startup'. There are about 10 different ways applications can auto start in windows and you have too check them all, as all will be used. My laptop from 2012 is 10-30 seconds. My laptop from last year is usually under 10. My NUC from 2011 is about 30 seconds and has been consistently that for the time I have owned it. Also on older computers check to see if it is thermal throttling. As the fans/paste can stop being effective and just need to be cleaned up after some time. My parents bought this rubish computer about 3 years ago it is easily 3-5 mins to startup. Which is due to a lack of RAM (3GB, which should be plenty) and windows swapping to startup. Plus a bunch of startup apps they 'just can not live without'. I remove them, and get 'wow the computer is so much faster'. Few months later and some update to that 'must have' app will put itself back into the startup (sigh).
    - snakeman 5y ago
      Amusingly, Microsoft provides their own tool (1) for excellent insight and enabling/disabling of all the various places applications can put their startup executables. 1 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...
      - 5y ago
ncann 5y ago
I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.
- leoncaet 5y ago
  I can't live without Everything!
- RandyRanderson 5y ago
  https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    Concur - 'Everything' is one of the first tools I install on a fresh PC. Blazingly fast file-system search with many useful options
    - mszcz 5y ago
      Yep. One of very few pieces of software that when it runs I swear I can actually hear the zillions of transistors in the CPU doing their job. Unlike an Electron app that tasks 16 cores with endless fucking apologizing for their creator's love of layers upon fucking layers of abstraction... Sorry, my PC's acting slow today, I'm tired and had a glass of wine already :P
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  For me Windows Explorer search became useful when I learned about its syntax. I can't remember it exactly right now, but I think it's something like `name:*.jpg` for example (and worst thing is it's localized, so you have to use whatever Windows Language you use). This way it does not try to be smart and just searches for file names. I think that in default mode it searches inside an indexed files or something like that, which probably is useful for ordinary users trying to search inside theirs docs.
smoldesu 5y ago
One time Windows got a "feature update" that made it not boot. Apparently it was an issue with Lenovo motherboards that is still not fixed to this day (afaik). In any case, that was the kick in the pants I needed to switch to Linux. Everything has gone swimmingly since!
- juniperplant 5y ago
  May I ask which distro?
  - TheCapn 5y ago
    Not OP, but I went to Ubuntu at first, but since it didn't like my Lenovo Yoga's tablet mode and screen rotation I gave up fighting it and went to Fedora. Works perfect out of box, I only had to change a few personal preferences to get it how I like it (changing touchpad so tap-to-click works, and using two finger tap for right click instead of lower right)
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I've been using Manjaro for the past 2 years. I used KDE for the first 6 months, but ended up switching to Gnome for the rest.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  On my new laptop Windows drivers were unstable (I tried both default Windows drivers and manufacturer's drivers). My audio was working for few hours and then disappear until reboot. I tried latest Fedora Linux and it's stable so far, no driver issues at all. I was pleasantly surprised.
- TheCapn 5y ago
  Same thing that gave me the kick to go over to Linux. Unfortunately I had a no-boot issue updating Fedora last week and had to do a complete re-install... at least I'm not paying for Fedora.
- asciimov 5y ago
  Just wait, one day you will have an update to linux and suddenly your whole system wont boot. This doesn't happen often, I've only had it happen 2 or 3 times in 10 years. It is good practice to have a restore thumbdrive around ready to go just in case.
antiterra 5y ago
Any chance some of this could be due to sidechannel exploit mitigation? The timing seems about right.
- moistbar 5y ago
  1809 is the first build that shipped with the mitigations, so that explains why there are a lot of performance problems around that time.
- Arcuru 5y ago
  Almost certainly. Several of the worst benchmarks (Win32 App launch, UWP App launch, and Explorer stress test) all start increasing in the 2018 H1/H2 releases. That matches the timeline for the Spectre/Meltdown fixes, and those are the benchmarks that I'd expect would be most effected. 17134 = 2018 H1 (1803) 17763 = 2018 H2 (1809)
AlfeG 5y ago
I'm not sure why they tested with disabled fast boot option? Why not disable every feature of system? Fast boot from powerdown is the reason why I stop using other power down states. Just shut system down, and boot it up in 10-15 seconds.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Because fastboot turns shutdown into something closer to hibernation, vs the shutdowns of yore. The author was trying to test a true cold-state, startup, vs what Microsoft claims is a start up, but isn’t really.
reader_mode 5y ago
I built a Windows PC after 3 years of using my 15 inch 2018 MBP (which is by far the worst machine I have owned considering the price). Windows has gone to shit, I have visual glitches in the UI using dark mode (even the search box on bottom left doesn't render correctly in dark mode until I hover it). They preinstall some shitty "news" bar right there on the task bar and hide disabling it behind a submenu of a right click on taskbar. Start menu search goes online by default and misdirects me because of it (I disabled it quickly). Using a 5k monitor and display scaling is very iffy as well compared to MacOS. I'm waiting on next get M1 and then I'm using the Windows box as a docker server I'll SSH into and maybe play some games. But using it as a daily driver is really underwhelming. I would use Linux desktop but from what I've heard HDPI scaling is even worse.
- rkagerer 5y ago
  Windows has gone to shit I feel the same way and it makes me sad. I've kept a death-grip on Windows 7 in hopes there would be a Windows 11 one day despite all the naive "last version ever" messaging. Now it's been announced, and I pray it's more than just a paint job. My asks are simple: more stability, better performance, and axed telemetry.
  - gred 5y ago
    There are dozens of us!
  - reader_mode 5y ago
    If anything I suspect they will double down on adding internet services to the OS and double down on the app store.
  - jamesgeck0 5y ago
    Didn’t Microsoft backport telemetry into Windows 7? You’ve got several of the same privacy issues as Windows 10 without the security improvements.
candiddevmike 5y ago
For me, every update seems to trigger some. NET compilation in the background (if I remember right). This process destroys your disk while it runs, and contributes a lot to the slowness in my experience.
Shadonototro 5y ago
windows 10 is what happen when you let clueless people work on an OS
ggregoire 5y ago
My up-to-date Windows 10 on a 3 years old desktop takes 9 seconds to boot (I just benchmarked it). I don't remember it being way faster before. So I wonder how OP gets 34 seconds, and how he went from 13 to 34 seconds over a couple of updates. Mine definitely didn't get 21 seconds slower.
- tpxl 5y ago
  What hardware are you running? OP was running a virtual machine with "4GB of RAM, 4 cores and a 32GB fixed disk for each build". I do wonder how if they only did one run per test or multiple, since n=1 will mean noise can mess with your results.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Probably OP is using a laptop. There are differences, but I've read a lot of comments and a lot of people aren't specific. So it's difficult to judge.
Ashanmaril 5y ago
I built my mom a moderate Windows PC for her accounting work a few years ago. Pretty standard Intel build, no graphics card cause it's not like she needs that. And for the most part it works fine, until every few months it'll slow down to an unusably slow crawl and I'll have to hop into task manager, see what rogue Windows service is bugging out this time, Google it, and find some forum post somewhere telling me what registry edit I have to do to disable some service that restores it to full speed.
- swiley 5y ago
  IME windows takes more work to administrate than many Linux distros at this point.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    It may require less administration but what administration you do have to do takes much longer in my experience - some Linux things are arcane, but much isn't, but when you get to things Microsoft don't really want you to play with you're on your own
    - mszcz 5y ago
      For me, what makes Linux a better administration experience is the ability to backup and move configuration. In Linux it's all files. In Windows? Who knows. It's registry entries, files spread across hidden directories and god knows what.
  - qalmakka 5y ago
    True that. On Linux _at least_ you almost always have a way out of issues, because you can pretty much forcefully change, update or modify everything. Windows has too much "magic" nobody outside of Redmond, WA truly understands, so when things go south you can only hope that it can fix itself, or it's a goner.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  MSCompatTelRunner.exe I've killed as much telemetry as I can, but every time my PC loses a core or two to a random background service, it's that piece of shit. No matter how much you purge it, it comes back. Removing execution permissions seems to work best, because Windows still realises that the file is there, but eventually it'll have its ACLs restored and the shitshow starts again.
moistbar 5y ago
All of the major slowdowns seem to pop up in build 1809, which is where the first Spectre/Meltdown mitigations were introduced, which is to be expected.
ziml77 5y ago
The spike in there is really weird. I'm wonder if that's spectre mitigations causing the bulk of the slowdown. If that's the case I'd be curious to know if disabling them helps and if popular Linux distributions show similar performance loss.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brudgers 5y ago
Some remarks: I used Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). 32GB fixed disk for each build. That is much much less than the typical Windows 10 hardware. the fast boot feature has been disabled for the purposes of this measurement. That is not the default and not reflective of most installations.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  > That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). Though not the default, Microsoft is moving more and more towards hypervisor-based security, for both kernel stuff and for browser stuff. Right now you need to enable it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 11 relies on it. The leaked installer already relies on having a TPM, after all. Out of all virtual machine technologies, Hyper-V is probably the one that will give Microsoft the best chances at being near-metal without passing through hardware. Other hypervisors shouldn't pose a problem, but they're not under Microsoft's control. If you have the time and hardware, you should feel free to test this on actual hardware instead; I doubt the results will differ much, though.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    > Though not the default, Microsoft is moving more and more towards hypervisor-based security So what? That doesn't change the fact that running these tests in a VM isn't going to be the same as running them on bare metal.
- nycdotnet 5y ago
  4 GB RAM seems impossibly tight as well. I'm not sure if 4 core and 4 GB was ever a common or representative setup for PCs; perhaps 2 core and 4 GB in the Vista timeframe...
  - einr 5y ago
    There were plenty of Core 2 Quads and Phenom X4's with 4 GB RAM around 2009.
afrcnc 5y ago
Yes.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
Over the past decade, software updates in general have mostly become another form of malware, as software makers care more about extracting money from their users or adding pointless shiny features than actually making their software fast, stable, or better able to serve the user. As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Windows and your browser at a bare minimum, and probably on any other software you use often or rely on. Yes, there are risks and downsides to doing this: security holes won't be patched, bugs won't be fixed, and new features won't be present. But everything in life is a balance. And on balance, the bad of updating is almost always worse than the good is good. This article highlights that in brilliant neon letters. How on EARTH do you justify boot and reboot times doubling or tripling, and just about every metric getting worse over time? Why would I let Microsoft fuck with my system if they're going to make it shittier? And of course, the article leaves out the worst part. Never mind gradual performance drops, there's a good chance that update you just downloaded just broke something. Entirely. Something you NEED to work. When is a fix coming? Anyone's guess. Install Windows 10 LTSB. It's the only one worth using. And unless you NEED a new feature or bugfix, never EVER update.
- yabones 5y ago
  In that case, install Debian Stable and stick to Firefox ESR. Nothing will ever change without warning, and you will have the most blissfully boring user experience.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Debian is great, personally i favour it most with either the LXDE or XFCE desktops - they're blissfully boring and functional! I would have perhaps recommended Ubuntu LTS to some folks previously because of the long release/support cycle (even if you only decide to install security updates), but i guess with software packages like snap infecting the OS i can no longer make that recommendation. Previously i would have suggested that some folks also look at CentOS because it's wonderfully stable and releases are supported for ~10 years, but i guess all of that was ended by Red Hat with CentOS 8. Maybe Rocky Linux will once again provide a stable RPM distro for free, without resorting to using Oracle Linux, but only time will show that. Is it just me, or have many once stable OS releases have been killed off in one way or another in the past decade, either forcing people to migrate to paid projects, forcing automatically updated software that cannot really be controlled easily (snaps) upon them, or doing other shady practices for no discernible reason? That said, i personally also only update software (like Nextcloud, GitLab, OpenProject etc.) manually between larger releases when i have made and re-checked backups of all of the data, before archiving the old versions and then migrating over a copy. I'm not sure whether i could live that way with OS updates or versions, though, without absolutely minimizing the attack surface - maybe with something like a locked down Alpine Linux. Either way, it feels like perhaps automatic updates that can't even be controlled being forced upon users are the inevitable future. It's nice that there's Debian, but my question would be: "How long before it goes the path of Ubuntu?"
phendrenad2 5y ago
To me, Windows 10 feels like it's getting faster. I've noticed that updates (even major ones) complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (as opposed to the old Microsoft tradition of "randomly taking hours").
Zababa 5y ago
I would be curious to see a "windows picture" or something test. I don't remember the name but the default app for opening images in windows 10 is so slow that it feels like a joke.
boba7 5y ago
>0.3 MB/s read/write to brand new HDD on W10 >Disk usage 100% It's a conspiracy.
siproprio 5y ago
So... UWP is a tenbagger: It got 10x slower in 5 years. I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.
- _trampeltier 5y ago
  Special since the last update, calc does need a long long time, even on a fast notebook. An app like calc should be open just instant. Even just a second is way to long on fast and modern hardware.
- vel0city 5y ago
  calc.exe on Win10 2004 loads way faster than Excel on my machine, its not even close. cmd.exe and powershell.exe are also way faster than Excel. Terminal is a smidge faster than Excel but a hair slower than either cmd.exe or powershell.exe.
  - siproprio 5y ago
    There's a calculator discussion now that calc is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/209 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/209 All other UWP apps that do not get GitHub attention are 100x worse. Microsoft Photos, for instance...
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Microsoft Photos also loads noticeably faster than Excel for me. Mail (the default Windows app) also loads faster than Excel. Edge loads faster than Excel. Your statement was: > I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel. but anecdotally this does not hold out for me. Not even close.
      - siproprio 5y ago
        Anecdotally, this holds out for me.
DoctorOW 5y ago
> “Each version was clean installed.” This might have been hard to recreate but I feel like some of the association with updates making things slower is the updating process itself. I was always told when a new Windows version came out that the advice was to back up files manually and clean install every time. I’d love to see a comparison between the statistics you have for clean installs and those done through the Windows Installer “Upgrade” path.
jdlyga 5y ago
How much of the slowdown has to do with the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations? There was a similar thread the other day about drastic performance hits on the Linux side.
sharms 5y ago
Disappointed I didn't see fairly reasonable explanations around processor security bugs which impact broad system performance such as Spectre and Meltdown. This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/ https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...
- koheripbal 5y ago
  What I find most disappointing is that even processors manufactured TODAY contain these flaws and have performance hits put into the firmware. This issue is so fundamental to how CPU caches work, that there really is not a true performance-neutral fix.
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    > What I find most disappointing is that even processors manufactured TODAY contain these flaws and have performance hits put into the firmware. The first (private) disclosure of the Spectre vulnerabilities was sometime in mid-late 2017. Partial hardware mitigations launched in 2019 for some Spectre variants, where the mitigations could be easily patched in to already taped-out designs. Beyond those easy wins, even if foundries weren’t slammed by COVID delays, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that we’d be any further along? Most of these sidechannels require deep rethinks of the execution pipeline and speculation engines, and fundamentally redesigning those systems, taping out those designs, and finally manufacturing those chips was always going to be a process that was measured in the better part of a decade.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I've seen a research paper that talks about something called "DAWG" that is supposed to preserve speculative execution while mitigating timing attacks. With some performance hit, but less than what we have today. The graphs in the paper seem to suggest a hit of 10% or less. Not my area of expertise, so no idea how promising it is. https://people.csail.mit.edu/vlk/dawg-micro18.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/vlk/dawg-micro18.pdf
nmstoker 5y ago
These speed issues are annoying but the thing that kills my experience is the lost clicks - and when one is missed, because it's quite common that Windows is just being its usual useless self, you then don't know for sure if it really missed the click or not. Invariably the time you think "it did miss it, try again", you'll click again only to find that now your slow Windows machine is stupidly struggling to do the damn task twice! The other issue doesn't sit completely with Windows: in a corporate environment, there are numerous remote activities that get hooked up without much thought or care and it only takes an occasional slow response with one or two of them for Windows to become unusable.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  that's one of the main reasons why i switched to linux. double clicking a file in windows to open it but it would activate file renaming instead. this was all on their surface book 2 which you would think would be fast enough but it used to happen quite a bit. ive been using windows since xp as well so its not like i don't know how to double click things. its something that only started happening a few years ago anyway, linux is great now. clicking only selects or opens a file, to rename you have to open the right click menu or press F2
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
boba7 5y ago
150MB word document works fine on Office 2010 but it hangs Office365 desktop word. What the hell Microsoft? I had to use LibreOffice to edit a word document created in your Word!
gbertasius 5y ago
I'm still on an 2nd gen i5 with 12gb of ram. Haven't noticed any slowdowns even with the huge amount of processes in the background. I've been updating regularly and have enjoyed Win10 for years.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Exactly my experience, but I'm a "stock" user. Meaning, I don't game, I don't have extra bells and whistles.
rsynnott 5y ago
I'd wonder what processor they used; mitigations for Spectre and friends could be a contributor.
listenallyall 5y ago
All I know is my Win 10 Pro laptop has 16gb RAM, yet if an application, most likely Google Chrome, uses more than about 4-5gb, it crashes. Yep, it's a lot of tabs. But not as many as you think, and often without warning, as certain ad-heavy sites, especially forum sites (flyertalk, rennlist), can sometimes require 1gb RAM alone.
- asdff 5y ago
  All the more reason to install serious ad blockers not found with Chrome and to install extensions that deal with old tabs instead of letting them pollute your memory
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    I disagree for a few reasons. First, why is the memory limit so low? Like I said, 16gb RAM, yet using just 30% of that total is too much? Secondly, I simply don't believe it is entirely ethical to consume all of the content with none of the ads. I deal with the egregious ad situation by visiting those sites infrequently -- visiting once every few months as opposed to every day, or skipping those links when they appear in a search result. But most sites, I believe it is a fair tradeoff to view an ad or two in order to read their site. Third, I would likely reach the memory limit without any greatly offending tabs... Google Maps is a big memory hog, many government sites are as well, and more.
    - asdff 5y ago
      If they want me to view their ads, all they have to do is make them less hostile to me such that they don't get blocked :)
- yyyk 5y ago
  >yet if an application, most likely Google Chrome, uses more than about 4-5gb, it crashes. 64bit apps shouldn't have such a limit under Windows, and can definitely use more memory. Perhaps you're seeing a case of RAM gone bad (where the large apps are much more likely to trip over the bad location)? Consider running memtest.
627467 5y ago
I don't know about slowing down: I do know that I keep getting stuck on some update after which I can't moved beyond due to some cryptic and unfixable error. This has happened for the 2nd time in a year and I end up having to download an up to date iso to move past the dead end update
scrps 5y ago
This is purely speculation and observation but I had to disable all the anti-telemetry hacks on my (aging) W10 gaming desktop and I noticed a marked increase in latency in everything from opening a folder to launching simple applications. Once I re-enabled all the patches the latency seem to vanish. I have no data or hard evidence to back any of this up so take it with a large grain of salt.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  What's the fastest way to configure this?
  - scrps 5y ago
    The two apps I have used in the past have been O&O ShutUp10[1] and SharpApp[2]. 1: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 2: https://github.com/builtbybel/sharpapp https://github.com/builtbybel/sharpapp
  - vczf 5y ago
    https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
septillianator 5y ago
After a recent update, i know that my bluetooth started intermittenly disconnecting and reconnecting. Continuous connectivity problems. Not a coincidence.
plasma 5y ago
I feel having a built-in graphics card that's poor also results in terrible performance, even if its just desktop use, things just become slow and laggy.
- Zambyte 5y ago
  If each update gets slower on the same graphics card, it's probably not the fault of the graphics card
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
stygiansonic 5y ago
How were these measurements obtained? Are they an average, and if so what was the variance of the measurements? For some the difference seems substantial but without knowing the variance across measurements it is a little difficult to assess whether the differences are actually significant. (Basically would there be a statistically significant difference between each condition) Obviously this would be a lot more work, so I don’t want to detract from the work that’s already been done.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
Before we can help each other and find the culprits, we need to be more detailed in what makes Windows 10 worse.
fouc 5y ago
This is great. I would especially love to see some sort of automated testing for this kind of benchmarking across different versions of windows, macos, linux, etc as well. I think it would be incredibly powerful for users to have access to these kind of metrics.
Causality1 5y ago
Is there even a point to benchmarking boot up time when you can't rely on it being consistent? Sure, it may be thirty seconds ninety percent of the time but the other ten percent it takes ten minutes because it decided installing an update is more important than whatever you wanted to use your computer for. I would never, ever tolerate a Windows 10 machine being the only computer in the house. There's too many times I need something right now and I have to do it with my phone because Microsoft is too busy fellating itself. This problem becomes exponentially worse on any machine that spends most of its time shut down, like a travel laptop.
pts_ 5y ago
Yes it's a hog.
seam_carver 5y ago
I replaced my laptop with HDD with SSD and Win10 is usable again. Did the same with my 2011 Desktop.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  You can't really run Windows on an HDD anymore... well you can, but it's not a good experience. It feels like all the speed we got from SSDs, and to some extent faster CPUs are quickly being consumed by Window, leaving us at the same speeds we had in 2010.
cable2600 5y ago
Sort of like MacOS, every update added more features and slowed it down. The special effects slow it down, you can disable them: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10...
ToFab123 5y ago
It would be interesting to see the results if windows was upgraded instead of doing clean install for each version. I find upgraded to be the #1 cause for issues with windows. A clean install (using iso downloaded from MS) normally resolves pretty much all problems and upgrade be the one that creates them.
black_puppydog 5y ago
Not having a windows machine here to test this, I can't believe some of the results there. Specifically the "Win32 applications" ones. 7 seconds to open the file manager or text editor? Or MS Paint?! On my laptop here I can load gimp including plugins within ~1.5-2s, and I never even bothered to optimize anything about this. I wouldn't even be able to measure the opening time of e.g. gedit without some sort of scripting. Are win32 apps really this slow to start up, or are the 7s "baseline" measurements in that experiment some cumulative value over all the applications?
- tallanvor 5y ago
  The benchmarks are hard to compare. He's using a VM and a fairly small amount of RAM (I don't know of many PCs only shipping with 4GB RAM these days). I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    4GB is actually pretty common for "budget" laptops in india. Check out Amazon.in and search for laptops. Anything above 40,000 inr is in the higher than budget, cheap range. For the past few years, there has been a trend of buying refurbished devices. Laptops and desktops. I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here. Oh, and the "gaming" and productivity series of brands are usually upwards of 80,000 inr which is exortbitantly high for majority of Indians. Just for some context, interns are paid 6-7000 bucks a month and a day labourer, unskilled earns a Max 700 bucks a day. So, a day labourer had to buy a cheap laptop for 30,000 bucks, have to work for 42 days. Oh, and you have the last year rush for buying cheap devices for online classes, with people have 2-3 kids, buying a laptop for 50,000 times 3 is out of the question. Again for context, cars in india start from 290,000 a maruti alto . https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs apple devices are rich mans luxury products here .
    - 5y ago
hello_tyler 5y ago
Glad to know it's windows and not my fault. My boot time went from 15 seconds to 30-45 now. I used to be able to reboot my computer and by the time I'd gotten a drink or tied my shoe it would be back to desktop. Beautiful. Now it's slow as hell.

406 points by pcr910303 5y ago

This exactly mirrors my experience. "Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.

the-dude 5y ago
How is stopping these days? I seem to remember there were about 79 reasons why Windows might not shutdown.
- hn8788 5y ago
  The only issue I've had with stopping is when it decides to update, and just hangs there with a completion percentage and the message "This could take a while." I almost always end up holding down the power button because it'll sit on the same percentage, sometimes 100%, for hours.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  that happens to coincide with the 79 ways to "power off" windows.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  My main complaint is all the programs that think all your documents are so precious that they refuse to shut down. Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI
- zlynx 5y ago
  I have a Windows virtual machine that was doing this to me a lot, and making Ubuntu reboots take a long time, and then requiring a disk check after the unclean shutdown. I found a registry key that tells Windows to force stop apps that block shutdown. I may lose an unsaved document once in a while but I would have lost it anyway, and I am pretty good about saving things when necessary. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop AutoEndTasks REG_SZ 1
- herbst 5y ago
  That vm I shut down last week, probably still is shutting down. Hope this answers your question
zlynx 5y ago
Not counting BIOS time it is about 5 seconds to Windows login on my Windows with NVMe systems. It does take about 20 seconds after login for it to finish loading all of the tiny startup notification icons, but that's actually intentional by Windows so it does not overload and prevent you from launching the apps you want. After login I can click on the web browser or email and it will launch instantly for me. If you are doing a lot of waiting look into getting an SSD for your boot drive. Or you're running some kind of corporate security product that is going to a remote server for "Mother, may I launch this?" on every EXE and DLL.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  The point is, why does OP need to spend money on an SSD (and create e-waste in the process) when an HDD used to be reasonably fast for the same task?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I have an SSD for a boot drive on my personal and work computers. Both go out for lunch for long periods of time. It might be me. I know my reaction time is 35% faster than my teenage son. I am much more bothered by latency than other people, I'm starting to think that I experience more time than other people. I can't stand playing single-player games on a Samsung TV that isn't in game mode. The sloppy response drains out all my fun. When I was playing League of Legends on a "gaming" laptop I found I couldn't ever win (not feel like I was floundering, attacks hitting me and i couldn't do anything about, people avoiding my attacks 100% of the time) until I attached an external monitor. I took movies and could show the timer was 30 ms late on the internal monitor compared to the internal monitor. Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me. The average person who walks into a museum will be able to tell you which paintings they like, and which they do not. An art historian, however, will be able to tell you why they like certain paintings, and discuss specific details in the composition. You are like the art historian. When you play a game on a laggy TV, you can tell that the TV's latency is making the game worse. A layperson just finds the game less engaging, and doesn't know that it could be better, much less why.
LinuxBender 5y ago
I have an old windows machine for playing WoW not happy with the Linux methods, but some day... and it does not have an SSD. I found one thing that helped was to disable a lot of the logging. In powershell on an administrator account: wevtutil el then select some or all of the logs to disable with wevtutil sl {logname} /e:false Another improvement since I only use it for WoW was to disable the spectre mitigations [1] remove some bloat with bleachbit [2] and then defragment the drive. Windows 10 specifically can be sped up a little bit by disabling some of the telemetry that is hidden away using O&O ShutUp10 [3] and improving network latency a little bit with the TCP/IP optimizer [4] as some startup applications rely on a response from servers. Now it starts up the same as when it was new. Maybe some day I will get a SSD. Another thing I found useful for Windows 10 was to disallow applications from running in the background which just "Suspends" applications rather than quitting. Suspending still takes up memory and pagefile. It's easier to see this in Process Explorer [5] I think they do this to mimic the behavior of a cell phone. Disabling suspending is less useful for startup time and more useful if you value your free memory. One more thing I should add that helped was to cache DNS on my home network. [1] - https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm [2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/ https://www.bleachbit.org/ [3] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 [4] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php [5] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  ... and you know I am always looking in the log and they are filled with stuff that seems irrelevant but never anything that explains why your computer crashed, why a service quit working, etc -- generally opening the event viewer seems to be a complete waste of time that I never get insights from. Disabling the log completely doesn't seem like a loss at all. As for the DNS I agree with that. Years ago when I first got DSL (1Mbps) I noticed that the browsing the web on a DSL line was slower than the dialup because DNS lookups took forever. Switching to a resolving DNS server was like taking a ton of bricks out of my car and installing a supercharger. I wonder if ISPs are just indifferent to DNS speed or if they see it as a form of "traffic shaping" that lowers load on their network.

fuzzy2 5y ago

Would be interesting how much worse it is if you upgrade in-place. Or is that what this test did? Overlaying SPECTRE etc. mitigations could also provide some insight.

boba7 5y ago

Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?

seniorThrowaway 5y ago
I have an older laptop with an hdd. It always was under powered but still usable for things like streaming to a tv every once in a while. The latest Win10 updates have it taking minutes to run a search or context switch. Feels like we are getting into phone territory of forced HW upgrades for everything now.
- boba7 5y ago
  I'm upgrading computers in my University with 8GB of ram and ssd and poof, 2011 computers run W10 just fine once again.
  - smhenderson 5y ago
    This was my experience as well updating computers at a company I recently joined. Changing to an SSD had the most impact, although a lot of these machines already had 8GB of RAM. There are still a handful around that now have an SSD but still 4GB of RAM they came with; these are also better now, usable anyway.
    - at-fates-hands 5y ago
      My company did the same thing a while back. I remember two years ago having to get in the office at least 20 minutes before my z book laptop would fully boot. They upgraded all the developer grade laptops with 32GB of RAM and SSD's. Still take a good 5-8 mins to boot, but compared to where they were? Light years better!
  - asdff 5y ago
    I did this to all my family members macbook pros a few years ago, back when apple let you do that sort of thing to your hardware. These machines are 10 years old and still running modern stuff just fine.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

At what point does Windows 10 cross into what people would generally call "unstable software" and call Microsoft's classification of "stable release" as being way too low a bar?

haunter 5y ago

On my current gaming PC (i7-7700) I have installed W10 in 2017 and... no problem whatsoever? SSD, 10s boot. idk how do people end up with all the problems. I'm really curious because there must be an underlying reason

LarryDarrell 5y ago
I think the Startup Processes really gets abused and people default to blame Windows for it. My time to a usable desktop seemed slow until I removed Teams, Steam, Dropbox and some other update utilities from Startup. Now it's pretty much instant.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  I keep mine startup fairly clean and this is key to a 'fast startup'. There are about 10 different ways applications can auto start in windows and you have too check them all, as all will be used. My laptop from 2012 is 10-30 seconds. My laptop from last year is usually under 10. My NUC from 2011 is about 30 seconds and has been consistently that for the time I have owned it. Also on older computers check to see if it is thermal throttling. As the fans/paste can stop being effective and just need to be cleaned up after some time. My parents bought this rubish computer about 3 years ago it is easily 3-5 mins to startup. Which is due to a lack of RAM (3GB, which should be plenty) and windows swapping to startup. Plus a bunch of startup apps they 'just can not live without'. I remove them, and get 'wow the computer is so much faster'. Few months later and some update to that 'must have' app will put itself back into the startup (sigh).
  - snakeman 5y ago
    Amusingly, Microsoft provides their own tool (1) for excellent insight and enabling/disabling of all the various places applications can put their startup executables. 1 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...
    - 5y ago

ncann 5y ago

I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.

leoncaet 5y ago
I can't live without Everything!
RandyRanderson 5y ago
https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  Concur - 'Everything' is one of the first tools I install on a fresh PC. Blazingly fast file-system search with many useful options
  - mszcz 5y ago
    Yep. One of very few pieces of software that when it runs I swear I can actually hear the zillions of transistors in the CPU doing their job. Unlike an Electron app that tasks 16 cores with endless fucking apologizing for their creator's love of layers upon fucking layers of abstraction... Sorry, my PC's acting slow today, I'm tired and had a glass of wine already :P
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vbezhenar 5y ago
For me Windows Explorer search became useful when I learned about its syntax. I can't remember it exactly right now, but I think it's something like `name:*.jpg` for example (and worst thing is it's localized, so you have to use whatever Windows Language you use). This way it does not try to be smart and just searches for file names. I think that in default mode it searches inside an indexed files or something like that, which probably is useful for ordinary users trying to search inside theirs docs.

smoldesu 5y ago

One time Windows got a "feature update" that made it not boot. Apparently it was an issue with Lenovo motherboards that is still not fixed to this day (afaik). In any case, that was the kick in the pants I needed to switch to Linux. Everything has gone swimmingly since!

juniperplant 5y ago
May I ask which distro?
- TheCapn 5y ago
  Not OP, but I went to Ubuntu at first, but since it didn't like my Lenovo Yoga's tablet mode and screen rotation I gave up fighting it and went to Fedora. Works perfect out of box, I only had to change a few personal preferences to get it how I like it (changing touchpad so tap-to-click works, and using two finger tap for right click instead of lower right)
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I've been using Manjaro for the past 2 years. I used KDE for the first 6 months, but ended up switching to Gnome for the rest.
vbezhenar 5y ago
On my new laptop Windows drivers were unstable (I tried both default Windows drivers and manufacturer's drivers). My audio was working for few hours and then disappear until reboot. I tried latest Fedora Linux and it's stable so far, no driver issues at all. I was pleasantly surprised.
TheCapn 5y ago
Same thing that gave me the kick to go over to Linux. Unfortunately I had a no-boot issue updating Fedora last week and had to do a complete re-install... at least I'm not paying for Fedora.
asciimov 5y ago
Just wait, one day you will have an update to linux and suddenly your whole system wont boot. This doesn't happen often, I've only had it happen 2 or 3 times in 10 years. It is good practice to have a restore thumbdrive around ready to go just in case.

antiterra 5y ago

Any chance some of this could be due to sidechannel exploit mitigation? The timing seems about right.

moistbar 5y ago
1809 is the first build that shipped with the mitigations, so that explains why there are a lot of performance problems around that time.
Arcuru 5y ago
Almost certainly. Several of the worst benchmarks (Win32 App launch, UWP App launch, and Explorer stress test) all start increasing in the 2018 H1/H2 releases. That matches the timeline for the Spectre/Meltdown fixes, and those are the benchmarks that I'd expect would be most effected. 17134 = 2018 H1 (1803) 17763 = 2018 H2 (1809)

AlfeG 5y ago

I'm not sure why they tested with disabled fast boot option? Why not disable every feature of system? Fast boot from powerdown is the reason why I stop using other power down states. Just shut system down, and boot it up in 10-15 seconds.

vxNsr 5y ago
Because fastboot turns shutdown into something closer to hibernation, vs the shutdowns of yore. The author was trying to test a true cold-state, startup, vs what Microsoft claims is a start up, but isn’t really.

reader_mode 5y ago

I built a Windows PC after 3 years of using my 15 inch 2018 MBP (which is by far the worst machine I have owned considering the price). Windows has gone to shit, I have visual glitches in the UI using dark mode (even the search box on bottom left doesn't render correctly in dark mode until I hover it). They preinstall some shitty "news" bar right there on the task bar and hide disabling it behind a submenu of a right click on taskbar. Start menu search goes online by default and misdirects me because of it (I disabled it quickly). Using a 5k monitor and display scaling is very iffy as well compared to MacOS. I'm waiting on next get M1 and then I'm using the Windows box as a docker server I'll SSH into and maybe play some games. But using it as a daily driver is really underwhelming. I would use Linux desktop but from what I've heard HDPI scaling is even worse.

rkagerer 5y ago
Windows has gone to shit I feel the same way and it makes me sad. I've kept a death-grip on Windows 7 in hopes there would be a Windows 11 one day despite all the naive "last version ever" messaging. Now it's been announced, and I pray it's more than just a paint job. My asks are simple: more stability, better performance, and axed telemetry.
- gred 5y ago
  There are dozens of us!
- reader_mode 5y ago
  If anything I suspect they will double down on adding internet services to the OS and double down on the app store.
- jamesgeck0 5y ago
  Didn’t Microsoft backport telemetry into Windows 7? You’ve got several of the same privacy issues as Windows 10 without the security improvements.

candiddevmike 5y ago

For me, every update seems to trigger some. NET compilation in the background (if I remember right). This process destroys your disk while it runs, and contributes a lot to the slowness in my experience.

Shadonototro 5y ago

windows 10 is what happen when you let clueless people work on an OS

ggregoire 5y ago

My up-to-date Windows 10 on a 3 years old desktop takes 9 seconds to boot (I just benchmarked it). I don't remember it being way faster before. So I wonder how OP gets 34 seconds, and how he went from 13 to 34 seconds over a couple of updates. Mine definitely didn't get 21 seconds slower.

tpxl 5y ago
What hardware are you running? OP was running a virtual machine with "4GB of RAM, 4 cores and a 32GB fixed disk for each build". I do wonder how if they only did one run per test or multiple, since n=1 will mean noise can mess with your results.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
Probably OP is using a laptop. There are differences, but I've read a lot of comments and a lot of people aren't specific. So it's difficult to judge.

Ashanmaril 5y ago

I built my mom a moderate Windows PC for her accounting work a few years ago. Pretty standard Intel build, no graphics card cause it's not like she needs that. And for the most part it works fine, until every few months it'll slow down to an unusably slow crawl and I'll have to hop into task manager, see what rogue Windows service is bugging out this time, Google it, and find some forum post somewhere telling me what registry edit I have to do to disable some service that restores it to full speed.

swiley 5y ago
IME windows takes more work to administrate than many Linux distros at this point.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  It may require less administration but what administration you do have to do takes much longer in my experience - some Linux things are arcane, but much isn't, but when you get to things Microsoft don't really want you to play with you're on your own
  - mszcz 5y ago
    For me, what makes Linux a better administration experience is the ability to backup and move configuration. In Linux it's all files. In Windows? Who knows. It's registry entries, files spread across hidden directories and god knows what.
- qalmakka 5y ago
  True that. On Linux _at least_ you almost always have a way out of issues, because you can pretty much forcefully change, update or modify everything. Windows has too much "magic" nobody outside of Redmond, WA truly understands, so when things go south you can only hope that it can fix itself, or it's a goner.
jeroenhd 5y ago
MSCompatTelRunner.exe I've killed as much telemetry as I can, but every time my PC loses a core or two to a random background service, it's that piece of shit. No matter how much you purge it, it comes back. Removing execution permissions seems to work best, because Windows still realises that the file is there, but eventually it'll have its ACLs restored and the shitshow starts again.

moistbar 5y ago

All of the major slowdowns seem to pop up in build 1809, which is where the first Spectre/Meltdown mitigations were introduced, which is to be expected.

ziml77 5y ago

The spike in there is really weird. I'm wonder if that's spectre mitigations causing the bulk of the slowdown. If that's the case I'd be curious to know if disabling them helps and if popular Linux distributions show similar performance loss.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brudgers 5y ago

Some remarks: I used Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). 32GB fixed disk for each build. That is much much less than the typical Windows 10 hardware. the fast boot feature has been disabled for the purposes of this measurement. That is not the default and not reflective of most installations.

jeroenhd 5y ago
> That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). Though not the default, Microsoft is moving more and more towards hypervisor-based security, for both kernel stuff and for browser stuff. Right now you need to enable it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 11 relies on it. The leaked installer already relies on having a TPM, after all. Out of all virtual machine technologies, Hyper-V is probably the one that will give Microsoft the best chances at being near-metal without passing through hardware. Other hypervisors shouldn't pose a problem, but they're not under Microsoft's control. If you have the time and hardware, you should feel free to test this on actual hardware instead; I doubt the results will differ much, though.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  > Though not the default, Microsoft is moving more and more towards hypervisor-based security So what? That doesn't change the fact that running these tests in a VM isn't going to be the same as running them on bare metal.
nycdotnet 5y ago
4 GB RAM seems impossibly tight as well. I'm not sure if 4 core and 4 GB was ever a common or representative setup for PCs; perhaps 2 core and 4 GB in the Vista timeframe...
- einr 5y ago
  There were plenty of Core 2 Quads and Phenom X4's with 4 GB RAM around 2009.

afrcnc 5y ago

Yes.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

Over the past decade, software updates in general have mostly become another form of malware, as software makers care more about extracting money from their users or adding pointless shiny features than actually making their software fast, stable, or better able to serve the user. As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Windows and your browser at a bare minimum, and probably on any other software you use often or rely on. Yes, there are risks and downsides to doing this: security holes won't be patched, bugs won't be fixed, and new features won't be present. But everything in life is a balance. And on balance, the bad of updating is almost always worse than the good is good. This article highlights that in brilliant neon letters. How on EARTH do you justify boot and reboot times doubling or tripling, and just about every metric getting worse over time? Why would I let Microsoft fuck with my system if they're going to make it shittier? And of course, the article leaves out the worst part. Never mind gradual performance drops, there's a good chance that update you just downloaded just broke something. Entirely. Something you NEED to work. When is a fix coming? Anyone's guess. Install Windows 10 LTSB. It's the only one worth using. And unless you NEED a new feature or bugfix, never EVER update.

yabones 5y ago
In that case, install Debian Stable and stick to Firefox ESR. Nothing will ever change without warning, and you will have the most blissfully boring user experience.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Debian is great, personally i favour it most with either the LXDE or XFCE desktops - they're blissfully boring and functional! I would have perhaps recommended Ubuntu LTS to some folks previously because of the long release/support cycle (even if you only decide to install security updates), but i guess with software packages like snap infecting the OS i can no longer make that recommendation. Previously i would have suggested that some folks also look at CentOS because it's wonderfully stable and releases are supported for ~10 years, but i guess all of that was ended by Red Hat with CentOS 8. Maybe Rocky Linux will once again provide a stable RPM distro for free, without resorting to using Oracle Linux, but only time will show that. Is it just me, or have many once stable OS releases have been killed off in one way or another in the past decade, either forcing people to migrate to paid projects, forcing automatically updated software that cannot really be controlled easily (snaps) upon them, or doing other shady practices for no discernible reason? That said, i personally also only update software (like Nextcloud, GitLab, OpenProject etc.) manually between larger releases when i have made and re-checked backups of all of the data, before archiving the old versions and then migrating over a copy. I'm not sure whether i could live that way with OS updates or versions, though, without absolutely minimizing the attack surface - maybe with something like a locked down Alpine Linux. Either way, it feels like perhaps automatic updates that can't even be controlled being forced upon users are the inevitable future. It's nice that there's Debian, but my question would be: "How long before it goes the path of Ubuntu?"

phendrenad2 5y ago

To me, Windows 10 feels like it's getting faster. I've noticed that updates (even major ones) complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (as opposed to the old Microsoft tradition of "randomly taking hours").

Zababa 5y ago

I would be curious to see a "windows picture" or something test. I don't remember the name but the default app for opening images in windows 10 is so slow that it feels like a joke.

boba7 5y ago

>0.3 MB/s read/write to brand new HDD on W10 >Disk usage 100% It's a conspiracy.

siproprio 5y ago

So... UWP is a tenbagger: It got 10x slower in 5 years. I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.

_trampeltier 5y ago
Special since the last update, calc does need a long long time, even on a fast notebook. An app like calc should be open just instant. Even just a second is way to long on fast and modern hardware.
vel0city 5y ago
calc.exe on Win10 2004 loads way faster than Excel on my machine, its not even close. cmd.exe and powershell.exe are also way faster than Excel. Terminal is a smidge faster than Excel but a hair slower than either cmd.exe or powershell.exe.
- siproprio 5y ago
  There's a calculator discussion now that calc is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/209 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/209 All other UWP apps that do not get GitHub attention are 100x worse. Microsoft Photos, for instance...
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Microsoft Photos also loads noticeably faster than Excel for me. Mail (the default Windows app) also loads faster than Excel. Edge loads faster than Excel. Your statement was: > I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel. but anecdotally this does not hold out for me. Not even close.
    - siproprio 5y ago
      Anecdotally, this holds out for me.

DoctorOW 5y ago

> “Each version was clean installed.” This might have been hard to recreate but I feel like some of the association with updates making things slower is the updating process itself. I was always told when a new Windows version came out that the advice was to back up files manually and clean install every time. I’d love to see a comparison between the statistics you have for clean installs and those done through the Windows Installer “Upgrade” path.

jdlyga 5y ago

How much of the slowdown has to do with the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations? There was a similar thread the other day about drastic performance hits on the Linux side.

sharms 5y ago

Disappointed I didn't see fairly reasonable explanations around processor security bugs which impact broad system performance such as Spectre and Meltdown. This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/ https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...

koheripbal 5y ago
What I find most disappointing is that even processors manufactured TODAY contain these flaws and have performance hits put into the firmware. This issue is so fundamental to how CPU caches work, that there really is not a true performance-neutral fix.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  > What I find most disappointing is that even processors manufactured TODAY contain these flaws and have performance hits put into the firmware. The first (private) disclosure of the Spectre vulnerabilities was sometime in mid-late 2017. Partial hardware mitigations launched in 2019 for some Spectre variants, where the mitigations could be easily patched in to already taped-out designs. Beyond those easy wins, even if foundries weren’t slammed by COVID delays, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that we’d be any further along? Most of these sidechannels require deep rethinks of the execution pipeline and speculation engines, and fundamentally redesigning those systems, taping out those designs, and finally manufacturing those chips was always going to be a process that was measured in the better part of a decade.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I've seen a research paper that talks about something called "DAWG" that is supposed to preserve speculative execution while mitigating timing attacks. With some performance hit, but less than what we have today. The graphs in the paper seem to suggest a hit of 10% or less. Not my area of expertise, so no idea how promising it is. https://people.csail.mit.edu/vlk/dawg-micro18.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/vlk/dawg-micro18.pdf

nmstoker 5y ago

These speed issues are annoying but the thing that kills my experience is the lost clicks - and when one is missed, because it's quite common that Windows is just being its usual useless self, you then don't know for sure if it really missed the click or not. Invariably the time you think "it did miss it, try again", you'll click again only to find that now your slow Windows machine is stupidly struggling to do the damn task twice! The other issue doesn't sit completely with Windows: in a corporate environment, there are numerous remote activities that get hooked up without much thought or care and it only takes an occasional slow response with one or two of them for Windows to become unusable.

mackrevinack 5y ago
that's one of the main reasons why i switched to linux. double clicking a file in windows to open it but it would activate file renaming instead. this was all on their surface book 2 which you would think would be fast enough but it used to happen quite a bit. ive been using windows since xp as well so its not like i don't know how to double click things. its something that only started happening a few years ago anyway, linux is great now. clicking only selects or opens a file, to rename you have to open the right click menu or press F2

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

boba7 5y ago

150MB word document works fine on Office 2010 but it hangs Office365 desktop word. What the hell Microsoft? I had to use LibreOffice to edit a word document created in your Word!

gbertasius 5y ago

I'm still on an 2nd gen i5 with 12gb of ram. Haven't noticed any slowdowns even with the huge amount of processes in the background. I've been updating regularly and have enjoyed Win10 for years.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
Exactly my experience, but I'm a "stock" user. Meaning, I don't game, I don't have extra bells and whistles.

rsynnott 5y ago

I'd wonder what processor they used; mitigations for Spectre and friends could be a contributor.

listenallyall 5y ago

All I know is my Win 10 Pro laptop has 16gb RAM, yet if an application, most likely Google Chrome, uses more than about 4-5gb, it crashes. Yep, it's a lot of tabs. But not as many as you think, and often without warning, as certain ad-heavy sites, especially forum sites (flyertalk, rennlist), can sometimes require 1gb RAM alone.

asdff 5y ago
All the more reason to install serious ad blockers not found with Chrome and to install extensions that deal with old tabs instead of letting them pollute your memory
- listenallyall 5y ago
  I disagree for a few reasons. First, why is the memory limit so low? Like I said, 16gb RAM, yet using just 30% of that total is too much? Secondly, I simply don't believe it is entirely ethical to consume all of the content with none of the ads. I deal with the egregious ad situation by visiting those sites infrequently -- visiting once every few months as opposed to every day, or skipping those links when they appear in a search result. But most sites, I believe it is a fair tradeoff to view an ad or two in order to read their site. Third, I would likely reach the memory limit without any greatly offending tabs... Google Maps is a big memory hog, many government sites are as well, and more.
  - asdff 5y ago
    If they want me to view their ads, all they have to do is make them less hostile to me such that they don't get blocked :)
yyyk 5y ago
>yet if an application, most likely Google Chrome, uses more than about 4-5gb, it crashes. 64bit apps shouldn't have such a limit under Windows, and can definitely use more memory. Perhaps you're seeing a case of RAM gone bad (where the large apps are much more likely to trip over the bad location)? Consider running memtest.

627467 5y ago

I don't know about slowing down: I do know that I keep getting stuck on some update after which I can't moved beyond due to some cryptic and unfixable error. This has happened for the 2nd time in a year and I end up having to download an up to date iso to move past the dead end update

scrps 5y ago

This is purely speculation and observation but I had to disable all the anti-telemetry hacks on my (aging) W10 gaming desktop and I noticed a marked increase in latency in everything from opening a folder to launching simple applications. Once I re-enabled all the patches the latency seem to vanish. I have no data or hard evidence to back any of this up so take it with a large grain of salt.

jiggawatts 5y ago
What's the fastest way to configure this?
- scrps 5y ago
  The two apps I have used in the past have been O&O ShutUp10[1] and SharpApp[2]. 1: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 2: https://github.com/builtbybel/sharpapp https://github.com/builtbybel/sharpapp
- vczf 5y ago
  https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

septillianator 5y ago

After a recent update, i know that my bluetooth started intermittenly disconnecting and reconnecting. Continuous connectivity problems. Not a coincidence.

plasma 5y ago

I feel having a built-in graphics card that's poor also results in terrible performance, even if its just desktop use, things just become slow and laggy.

Zambyte 5y ago
If each update gets slower on the same graphics card, it's probably not the fault of the graphics card
MonaroVXR 5y ago
https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

stygiansonic 5y ago

How were these measurements obtained? Are they an average, and if so what was the variance of the measurements? For some the difference seems substantial but without knowing the variance across measurements it is a little difficult to assess whether the differences are actually significant. (Basically would there be a statistically significant difference between each condition) Obviously this would be a lot more work, so I don’t want to detract from the work that’s already been done.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

Before we can help each other and find the culprits, we need to be more detailed in what makes Windows 10 worse.

fouc 5y ago

This is great. I would especially love to see some sort of automated testing for this kind of benchmarking across different versions of windows, macos, linux, etc as well. I think it would be incredibly powerful for users to have access to these kind of metrics.

Causality1 5y ago

Is there even a point to benchmarking boot up time when you can't rely on it being consistent? Sure, it may be thirty seconds ninety percent of the time but the other ten percent it takes ten minutes because it decided installing an update is more important than whatever you wanted to use your computer for. I would never, ever tolerate a Windows 10 machine being the only computer in the house. There's too many times I need something right now and I have to do it with my phone because Microsoft is too busy fellating itself. This problem becomes exponentially worse on any machine that spends most of its time shut down, like a travel laptop.

pts_ 5y ago

Yes it's a hog.

seam_carver 5y ago

I replaced my laptop with HDD with SSD and Win10 is usable again. Did the same with my 2011 Desktop.

mrweasel 5y ago
You can't really run Windows on an HDD anymore... well you can, but it's not a good experience. It feels like all the speed we got from SSDs, and to some extent faster CPUs are quickly being consumed by Window, leaving us at the same speeds we had in 2010.

cable2600 5y ago

Sort of like MacOS, every update added more features and slowed it down. The special effects slow it down, you can disable them: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10...

ToFab123 5y ago

It would be interesting to see the results if windows was upgraded instead of doing clean install for each version. I find upgraded to be the #1 cause for issues with windows. A clean install (using iso downloaded from MS) normally resolves pretty much all problems and upgrade be the one that creates them.

black_puppydog 5y ago

Not having a windows machine here to test this, I can't believe some of the results there. Specifically the "Win32 applications" ones. 7 seconds to open the file manager or text editor? Or MS Paint?! On my laptop here I can load gimp including plugins within ~1.5-2s, and I never even bothered to optimize anything about this. I wouldn't even be able to measure the opening time of e.g. gedit without some sort of scripting. Are win32 apps really this slow to start up, or are the 7s "baseline" measurements in that experiment some cumulative value over all the applications?

tallanvor 5y ago
The benchmarks are hard to compare. He's using a VM and a fairly small amount of RAM (I don't know of many PCs only shipping with 4GB RAM these days). I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  4GB is actually pretty common for "budget" laptops in india. Check out Amazon.in and search for laptops. Anything above 40,000 inr is in the higher than budget, cheap range. For the past few years, there has been a trend of buying refurbished devices. Laptops and desktops. I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here. Oh, and the "gaming" and productivity series of brands are usually upwards of 80,000 inr which is exortbitantly high for majority of Indians. Just for some context, interns are paid 6-7000 bucks a month and a day labourer, unskilled earns a Max 700 bucks a day. So, a day labourer had to buy a cheap laptop for 30,000 bucks, have to work for 42 days. Oh, and you have the last year rush for buying cheap devices for online classes, with people have 2-3 kids, buying a laptop for 50,000 times 3 is out of the question. Again for context, cars in india start from 290,000 a maruti alto . https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs apple devices are rich mans luxury products here .
  - 5y ago

hello_tyler 5y ago

Glad to know it's windows and not my fault. My boot time went from 15 seconds to 30-45 now. I used to be able to reboot my computer and by the time I'd gotten a drink or tied my shoe it would be back to desktop. Beautiful. Now it's slow as hell.