To be fair, I have not run Vista myself, but I was at a friend’s house and he wanted to open a folder with about 300 pics in it and it literally took over 10 minutes to display (this was pre SP1)! Holy cow!
There does seem to be a problem with perception of speed (I know I have seen dialogs stuck at 100% on many systems (not just Vista) and found it frustrating…)
But the file copy problem on Vista is not totally down to perception it also has to do with reality
There are many complaints (some here as well) that Vista under some circumstances actually takes much longer to copy files (for no apparent reason) in the order of XP takes 30s, Vista takes 10’s of minutes?
and Vista does seem to take much longer to open folder with large numbers of files so copying the contents of a folder as a complete procedure can take much longer (open folder, select files, copy…)
These are both things that should have been shaken out in the Beta’s, I think we can learn something about software testing …
I think that some of the perceived frustration with Windows - the Explorer “shell”, Outlook, etc., is the way that there seems to be no multitasking at the UI end. If you ask one of them to do something (look for a printer, create a new contact, check for new emails) it holds you hostage until it either completes the task or times out.
Or am I the only person who mutters “give me back my computer, Bill” several times a day…
And yes, “I can’t copy one of your files because it was in use by another application a little while ago so I’m going to give up on the entire operation” is insanely stupid and frustrating. Why in G_d’s name can’t Windows copy a file that’s in use, anyway? Or why, after I’ve saved an Excel file fifteen times and decide it’s time to close it, does Excel ask me “Do you want to save?”
Arggh!
I learnt the lesson of perceived against actual time a long time ago in the late 80’s. Developing a little embedded module that processed the data from a CCD line scanner the feedback I got said that the process took a long time. So I put a little wirly-gig (cycling through the characters / - \ |) on the little 2 line LCD display and spun it. Immediately the feedback changed to “wow!, you’ve made some major improvment to the code”. I hadn’t changed the code, except to slow it down by putting in the wirly-gig!
for a company at the size the programmers dont earn the pay if they dont take the people using the software into account.
Perception is reality here.
Xp dismissing the dialog before it’s really doen could indeed be a problem. If your’re backing up to a removable drive at the end of the day (like I tend to), the you might be unplugging your USB drive while data is still copying.
In my programs, I tend to use a progress bar with a pessimizing time estimate. If the progress is 90%, mulitply the calculated remaining time by 1.05 and show that to the user. If the progress is 80%, multiply by 1.075 and show that to the user.
File copy speed also differs if you’re copying to the same physical hard drive, or a different one.
This really does not need to become another Win vs. Linux battle.
Jeff is providing a really good point for anyone designing and/or implementing interfaces to consider.
Even if your writing something for Linux. : )
So please step back and try to realize this is just a contributing thought, there’s really nothing negative to it.
Peace!
I already googled this when I first got vista it seemed slow lots of people reporting the same thing. One of the things that slows vistas copy down I believe is that it tries to implement DRM copy protection.
But that’s not what really annonys me the thing that annoys me is the time estimate is always way off sometimes I get reports of hours on large copies when I know it will take around 20 minutes or something. This report becomes little more accurate until the process is complete. I find this rediculous I can do an estimate just doing the amount transferred so far and time taken compared to the total file size. I know fragmented and small files take longer to copy but seriously can’t we just have a simple estimate which I find much more accurate for the general case.
Nchantim,
Actually, you can specify in the device settings for your USB drive (right-click - Properties - Hardware - Properties - Policies)whether to enable write-caching or not on that device. If you enable it, then you need to use the “Safely remove hardware” command in the system tray. If you disable write-caching, then you can remove the drive no problem.
This is a great example of how difficult it is do get something just right. So many factors are involved in producing really good software. So many things can go wrong. You try and try to think of all the possible scenarios. You test and you test and you test, but once again, some things you just can’t test for. You’ve got to set it loose in the wild and hope it thrives (or at least survives!) This is one of those cases. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and apply that knowledge for future development.
“Xp dismissing the dialog before it’s really doen could indeed be a problem. If your’re backing up to a removable drive at the end of the day (like I tend to), the you might be unplugging your USB drive while data is still copying.”
Amen. That has bitten me more times than I care to mention. I always use the “safely remove drive” function but it often tells me that it is still in use. Now I know why!
Thanks!
Why spend money on a new os when the old one works much better than the new one.And off course,people are actually complaining that its bad so it has to be a half baked thing.Well sorry to all the people who brought copies.The prices have been slashed etc since no one wants it and even if you brought it why go through all the pain when everything works with XP.So it has a fancy UI and bloats.Oh yes we are all consumers and we need to consume,throw it all at us we will lap it up and empty our wallets for Microsoft.
No more!!!
BOYCOTT VISTA !!!
I strongly suspect you are over-thinking this. The actual problem was not some subtle perception of performance, but actual real-world disk-thrashing 30 minute copies that used to take seconds. Subtle perceptual issue can make 5 seconds seem like 10 - they can’t make 10 seconds seem like 10 minutes.
To quote a comment to the referenced post:
‘On larger codebases (50.000+ small files) this created a situation here. We’ve actually measured the time that it takes to boot Windows XP to make a backup copy before booting back into Vista to continue development and that’s actually FASTER than waiting for Vista to get the job done.’
The relevant point in the article is ‘with Vista’s non-cached implementation, Explorer is forced to wait for each write operation to complete before issuing more’ - the new algorithm was synchronous per file. If it has to copy 10,000 files, it does the first one completely, including close and sync, then moves on the the second, then the third. This means the minimum file copy time was of the order of (number of files to copy * disk seek + write time).
The take-away lesson from this should be that the benchmark they optimised to should have contained an extra case: a few hundred thousand small files. In general, any time you are optimising to the point of making trade-offs, instead of just removing slow code, you need a flll representative set of benchmarks. If you don’t have, and can’t create, such a thing, best leave the code alone.
To be fair, I have not run Vista myself, but I was at a friend’s house and he wanted to open a folder with about 300 pics in it and it literally took over 10 minutes to display (this was pre SP1)! Holy cow!
Dude on March 3, 2008 05:01 AM
–8--
Dude, You are right, that happens, especially when the folder hasn’t been opened before (no thumbs.db). But it doesn’t prevent me from using my computer in another application, or even another explorer window in my experience on Vista whereas the same sort of thing completely disables my XP machine from handling any user input until it’s done. As with everything, your mileage may vary.
Kris
At any rate, the point is moot, because Vista SP1 switched back to the XP style cached copy.
Exactly one more reason not to switch to Vista.
Sorry for the double post(hit Enter too soon).
What I find most annoying: “Estimated time to completion: 5 seconds” and it sits there for almost a minute. Does my software “lie” to me?
poor windows…still working on that file copy algorithm. They can’t get anything write…hehehe
cp
If you’re moving enough files in either XP or Vista to warrant arguing about speed and efficiency, then neither of the two GUIs win as you should be using the command line. But that’s not what Jeff’s post is about, it’s about stepping outside of the programmer mindset and putting yourself in the user’s shoes.
I don’t quite get it… files in the disk cache are readable, right? Once XP put the files in disk cache, I could read and write them. Except for the rare case when I was powering down, it was DONE with the operation as far as I was concerned. Vista made me wait longer.
Plus, installing software is damn slow. Maybe the installer is waiting for everything to get written to disk before proceeding to the next file? What the hell is Vista’s disk cache for if you don’t get to use it?
At least two posts have mentioned DRM slowing down Vista file copies. Could you provide some evidence for this?
It may be true but I never saw any actual evidence for it so I have assumed it to be FUD that resulted from that awful, speculative and largely bogus Peter Gutmann article.