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I used to work at a high-performance scientific computing company. In the mid-2000s they ran into a weird issue where performance would crater on customer PCs r

I used to work at a high-performance scientific computing company. In the mid-2000s they ran into a weird issue where performance would crater on customer PCs running windows, unless that PC were currently running Windows Media Player. Something to do with process scheduling priority. Don’t know whether this was a widely-disseminated old hand trick of the era or anything.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Const-me 5y ago
Probably timeBeginPeriod WinAPI called by that media player: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/nf-timeapi-timebeginperiod https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/n...
- vardump 5y ago
  Google Chrome had exactly that effect and at least in the past running Google Chrome made some software to function correctly. (Although perhaps there's also some software timeBeginPeriod(1) affects negatively.) Doesn't help when your testers run Google Chrome all the time...
shmerl 5y ago
Remind me this: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-mouse-in-windows-95-made-the-os-faster https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...
bee_rider 5y ago
It is astonishing to me that someone would want to use Windows for something HPC related. I'm not generally a Windows hater (actually I am, but I see that there are legitimate business reasons to use it), but the HPC ecosystem seems much more Linux-friendly.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  It is, but there are a lot of applications that people like to use on Windows PCs (think CAD or data analysis stuff) that have computationally-intensive subroutines. In that company’s case it was GPU-accelerated electromagnetic wave simulations, seismic imaging reconstruction, and CT scan reconstruction. The company developed these libraries and licensed them for use in larger CAD or data analysis software packages.
- aldebran 5y ago
  The windows team works closely with hardware makers to support new and upcoming specialized hardware. This enables hardware makers to focus on hardware bring up and not worry about OS support. There are many technologies that work first or better until a certain time on Windows. For example (not necessarily HPC related) SMR drive support.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I definitely agree that if I had to get some random device working, Windows is probably a good first OS to try. But since Linux has such a large supercomputer/cluster/cloud presence, the situation is sort of flipped for HPC. At least as far as I've seen -- most numerical codes seem to target the Unix-verse first, and the only weird drivers you need are the GPU drivers (actually I haven't tried much GPGPU out, but I believe the Linux NVIDIA GPGPU drivers aren't the same horrorshow that their desktop counterparts are).
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Speaking for the time I used to be at CERN, while the cluster is fully UNIX based, there is a big crowd of researchers running visualisation software, and other research related work on Windows e.g. Matlab/Tableau/Excel, and nowadays I assume macOS as well (it was early days for it 20 years ago).
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        I was thinking more of the number crunching bits, rather than visualization, since the original issue was around performance. But I guess visualization can be computationally cruncy too.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Const-me 5y ago

Probably timeBeginPeriod WinAPI called by that media player: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/nf-timeapi-timebeginperiod https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/n...

vardump 5y ago
Google Chrome had exactly that effect and at least in the past running Google Chrome made some software to function correctly. (Although perhaps there's also some software timeBeginPeriod(1) affects negatively.) Doesn't help when your testers run Google Chrome all the time...

shmerl 5y ago

Remind me this: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-mouse-in-windows-95-made-the-os-faster https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...

bee_rider 5y ago

It is astonishing to me that someone would want to use Windows for something HPC related. I'm not generally a Windows hater (actually I am, but I see that there are legitimate business reasons to use it), but the HPC ecosystem seems much more Linux-friendly.

ahelwer 5y ago
It is, but there are a lot of applications that people like to use on Windows PCs (think CAD or data analysis stuff) that have computationally-intensive subroutines. In that company’s case it was GPU-accelerated electromagnetic wave simulations, seismic imaging reconstruction, and CT scan reconstruction. The company developed these libraries and licensed them for use in larger CAD or data analysis software packages.
aldebran 5y ago
The windows team works closely with hardware makers to support new and upcoming specialized hardware. This enables hardware makers to focus on hardware bring up and not worry about OS support. There are many technologies that work first or better until a certain time on Windows. For example (not necessarily HPC related) SMR drive support.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I definitely agree that if I had to get some random device working, Windows is probably a good first OS to try. But since Linux has such a large supercomputer/cluster/cloud presence, the situation is sort of flipped for HPC. At least as far as I've seen -- most numerical codes seem to target the Unix-verse first, and the only weird drivers you need are the GPU drivers (actually I haven't tried much GPGPU out, but I believe the Linux NVIDIA GPGPU drivers aren't the same horrorshow that their desktop counterparts are).
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Speaking for the time I used to be at CERN, while the cluster is fully UNIX based, there is a big crowd of researchers running visualisation software, and other research related work on Windows e.g. Matlab/Tableau/Excel, and nowadays I assume macOS as well (it was early days for it 20 years ago).
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I was thinking more of the number crunching bits, rather than visualization, since the original issue was around performance. But I guess visualization can be computationally cruncy too.