4 ms·

Here are a few issues with it: event 500 / 501 with aero at 1920x1080 screen resolution - bad design & inefficient use of GPU functions and hardware for desktop

Here are a few issues with it: event 500 / 501 with aero at 1920x1080 screen resolution - bad design & inefficient use of GPU functions and hardware for desktop composition & aero While this may be normal behaviour for pre-DX10.1/11 cards due to software emulation of some functions, this is not ok for DX10.1/11 cards which have those functions. laggy video - I couldn't get Windows 7 to play any kind of video smoothly on a GT 450 and 9800 GT at 720/1080p on an i7 with w7 64bit; you think you can play it smoothly, but then I play the same file on linux box and it's so smooth you'd think there's no such thing as frames if you kill ALL your apps (including services and background apps which are part of your apps) and you check how many requests per second to the registry there are, you will have a shock; I did this back in the XP era and it had like 50-100 registry requests / second. if you leave a W7 machine on for more than 24 hours and you have more than 6-8GB of RAM, you will have degraded performance even if you close the apps (memory leaks and/or memory fragmentation, maybe other issues) As for Linux, it's been quite laggy and buggy before in the aspect of responsiveness, but it seems to have improved in those areas recently. Mac OS X is doing fine too so far. edit: Let's not forget game input lag. Also, some CPU intensive games perform better when you set the priority of the processes which are 100% idle in 99.99% of the time to idle. I am talking about things like print spooler, app notifiers & tray area apps, updater apps and others like these. If linux seems slower in the graphics department, keep in mind it's got an X server, apps which render in that X server and that brings quite some overhead. Even though this is how things are, Linux is pretty close to "being there", pretty much like OS X is. Windows also lets processes starve the entire OS completely. It's not ok to have resources be eaten up completely so that the user might have to wait even hours until a task is done so that CPU usage drops below 100% across 4 or 6 cores of a system. This isn't normal. Also, Windows can give you high latency and bad performance even when there are more than enough resources: CPU & memory. Therefore, I'd say that the Windows scheduler is closer to the treat all processes equally and / or sink more time into idle processes with more idle threads than into processes with fewer threads and more active threads model. Linux hasn't left me with this impression recently and OS X hasn't left me with this impression since Leopard / Snow Loepard.

barrkel 15y ago
Event 500 and 501 seem like false alarms (I had never heard about them until today). I have a fairly high spec video card (AMD 5870) and when I drill into the log where those events show up, I can see there's been a few of them every day - but I've never actually noticed any performance degradation. I would never have known that they were being produced until I looked into them, and on the basis of the lack of actual degradation, I'm confident I can forget about them. Video is fine and clear for me across a much larger range of codecs than I've ever seen on Linux (or Mac, for that matter). I normally get no more than 2% CPU utilization for video playback; any HD content I have is hardware accelerated, I expect. 50/100 requests per second is meaningless without knowing the cost of those requests. My machine, if you ignore superscalar architecture and hypethreading, is capable of over 12 billion operations per second. Unless these registry reads have fairly substantial costs, they're completely unnoticeable. My Windows 7 machine here currently has an uptime of 48 days. I seldom reboot until the Windows Update nag gets the better of me, and I frequently turn off the update service to get rid of the nag. I have 12GB of RAM, and I've never seen this degraded performance you speak of. I wrote my own print spooler (it actually runs on a different machine) and have a bunch of tray applications: CrashPlan, DropBox, Process Explorer, corporate VPN, occasionally Skype and Steam. Again, I've not noticed any performance drain from these things. Not even games these days are CPU constrained; with 4 cores (or 8 if you include hyperthreading) the only thing that taxes my CPU is video transcoding. There's plenty of spare CPU capacity in games; they seldom get above 30 or 40% utilization. If you really think Windows is odd in starving the system for non-low-priority runaway processes, try running a forkbomb without ulimits in place on your Linux or Mac machines. But I have no difficulty running Handbrake or SuperPI or similar utilizing 100% CPU but still having responsiveness enough to shut them down etc. It's extraordinarily rare for me to find myself in front of a Windows machine where the UI is completely unresponsive except in cases of driver conflict or flaky hardware (e.g. a paging error from a bad hard drive will do horrible things). I don't know why you've soured so much on Windows, or what bad experience it was that pushed you over the edge, but when you bring up things like registry traffic and this "event 500/501", I get the impression that you are actively looking for things you think are worth complaining about, rather than pointing out things that are actually hampering your interaction. It hurts your credibility in my eyes, frankly. (FWIW, I was a computer technician before I became a software engineer, and I've been working with Windows of all varieties since about 1993, including the early (3.1 and 3.51) versions of NT (almost 20 years, scary!). I've dealt with thousands of machines running Windows. And for MS OSes based on NT, problems have overwhelmingly been because of hardware or driver issues, almost never because of OS issues.)

barrkel 15y ago

Event 500 and 501 seem like false alarms (I had never heard about them until today). I have a fairly high spec video card (AMD 5870) and when I drill into the log where those events show up, I can see there's been a few of them every day - but I've never actually noticed any performance degradation. I would never have known that they were being produced until I looked into them, and on the basis of the lack of actual degradation, I'm confident I can forget about them. Video is fine and clear for me across a much larger range of codecs than I've ever seen on Linux (or Mac, for that matter). I normally get no more than 2% CPU utilization for video playback; any HD content I have is hardware accelerated, I expect. 50/100 requests per second is meaningless without knowing the cost of those requests. My machine, if you ignore superscalar architecture and hypethreading, is capable of over 12 billion operations per second. Unless these registry reads have fairly substantial costs, they're completely unnoticeable. My Windows 7 machine here currently has an uptime of 48 days. I seldom reboot until the Windows Update nag gets the better of me, and I frequently turn off the update service to get rid of the nag. I have 12GB of RAM, and I've never seen this degraded performance you speak of. I wrote my own print spooler (it actually runs on a different machine) and have a bunch of tray applications: CrashPlan, DropBox, Process Explorer, corporate VPN, occasionally Skype and Steam. Again, I've not noticed any performance drain from these things. Not even games these days are CPU constrained; with 4 cores (or 8 if you include hyperthreading) the only thing that taxes my CPU is video transcoding. There's plenty of spare CPU capacity in games; they seldom get above 30 or 40% utilization. If you really think Windows is odd in starving the system for non-low-priority runaway processes, try running a forkbomb without ulimits in place on your Linux or Mac machines. But I have no difficulty running Handbrake or SuperPI or similar utilizing 100% CPU but still having responsiveness enough to shut them down etc. It's extraordinarily rare for me to find myself in front of a Windows machine where the UI is completely unresponsive except in cases of driver conflict or flaky hardware (e.g. a paging error from a bad hard drive will do horrible things). I don't know why you've soured so much on Windows, or what bad experience it was that pushed you over the edge, but when you bring up things like registry traffic and this "event 500/501", I get the impression that you are actively looking for things you think are worth complaining about, rather than pointing out things that are actually hampering your interaction. It hurts your credibility in my eyes, frankly. (FWIW, I was a computer technician before I became a software engineer, and I've been working with Windows of all varieties since about 1993, including the early (3.1 and 3.51) versions of NT (almost 20 years, scary!). I've dealt with thousands of machines running Windows. And for MS OSes based on NT, problems have overwhelmingly been because of hardware or driver issues, almost never because of OS issues.)