[Samba] Vista SP1 performance fix - maybe!

[Dennis McLeod]

Perhaps this may be of help...

From: http://www.wservernews.com/

Slow Vista File Copy Nightmare Solved!

WSN Reader Nick's Vista Horror story in last issue has a follow-up. He
wrote: "I MAY have finally turned the corner on Vista turning me gray and
bald, although what little hair I have left after the last 4 weeks is
definitely going gray :) I bought a MS Wireless Desktop 1000 to install on
that Latitude ATG 620 with Vista Business that has been torturing me.
Certified for Vista. Install Intellipoint 6.1 off the disk. Plug in the
receiver. No joy. It wants the disk. Says the disk has no drivers. WTF.
Download and install Intellipoint 6.2. Plug in the receiver. No joy. It
wants the disk.

Now, we've been to 'Trinity and Beyond.' Where do we go from there? Chixulub
asteroid impact? Call MS hardware support (They were good). Eventually
discover that NO new hardware (i.e. thumb drives, wired keyboards, anything)
will install. OK. Uninstall SP1. Install Intelli point 6.2 again and Lo! and
behold! the hardware installs. Great.

Test the network response time without SP1. Now, there is nothing
particularly old, creaky or obscure in my setup. I've got a PowerEdge 800
running SBS 2003 for a server and a Cisco SB2024 Gigabit switch. It took 5
MINUTES to copy a 61 MB file. Sigh. Install SP1 again. Hey, the hardware
still works AND I can install other new hardware. It's a miracle. Test the
network response time, again. Now it takes 40 seconds to copy that 61 MB
file. XP only takes 8-10 seconds. It beats 5 minutes, but it still ain't
great. So I start googling for post-SP1 slow-file-copy bug problems.
Eventually, I come across a reference to Mark Minassi's blog that deals with
the autotuning feature of the new TCP stack and that even relatively new
switches and routers may not like the autotuning 'feature'. (SP1 by default
undoes all the tweaking that poor bastards like me have been flailing away
at to try and fix this EVIL.) So I enter the following into an
Administrative cmd window:

C:\> netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Now I tried that pre-SP1 and it didn't make a darn bit of difference. But Lo
and behold! The 61 MB file now comes down the pipe in 6 seconds. So I test
pull the SP1 mega-executable from the server (434 MB) Takes 1 minute 34
seconds. Run the same test on XP. Takes 1 minute 53 seconds. It's a miracle.
We still aren't smiling. Its been a full year, a service pack, and a command
line tweak to get performance better than what XP had to offer. MS has burnt
a lot of credibility with me with their utter silence on this issue--and
how, if they eat their own dogfood, that this issue ever got out the door
without being caught and killed. But there is light at the end of the Vista
tunnel--and maybe all the hair I have pulled out will grow back in brown and
not gray :) 


Anyway, it's worth looking at.
Dennis