Hey Now Jeff,
Should the Vista’s team listened to there users? Would UAT (user acceptance testing) helped the file copy performance perception? I like the post since it’s so true.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
That is funny. I have XP and I have vista.
Moving a media file (from my digital video camera) used to take seconds and now takes 15 minutes.
Seconds Minutes.
You can’t tell me it was sitting there in the background copying, because it wasn’t.
Part of the reason why I’m still on W2K SP4!
I found that except for large video files, Vista copied faster than XP every time - the more the files the better the performance.
SP1 did indeed improve the prediction delay and that definitely improved the experience for me, but it did not make it copy any faster.
Maybe it is because I open the dialog and what the data flow rate more than anything else. I find that bit of information very comforting.
Oh, and as I mentioned on Mark R’s Blog Vista still has one VERY annoying behaviour from XP. If you move a file on drive X from folder A to folder B, it moves instantly. If folder B already contains a file with the same name, instead of deleting the target and performing the same instant move (just relinking directory structures), it COPIES the file over the target in a pedantic byte by byte method and then deletes the original. Suddenly moving a GB size file goes from instant to inexcusably slow (slower than if you moved it to another HD)
From a Hanselminutes show on x64 Vista:
Franklin: How many developers does it take to copy a file on a Mac?
Hanselman: I don’t know.
Franklin: What’s a file?
Hanselman: How many developers does it take to copy a file on Vista?
Fanklin: Don’t know.
Hanselman: I don’t know either, still calculating…
Just last night i was unzipping a 2gig file. There was no notification that the process was happening. The Calculating messagebox showed 7bytes/sec. 7bytes per second I thought there was a problem, killed and restarted explorer, tried again, same thing. I went back and forth to figure out the problem. Turns out there was no problem except for lack of notification.
After letting it sit, looking like the process was hung up, it eventually finished in about 2 minutes, what I would expect time wise from an xp box. Unfortunately I wasted ten times that thinking there was a problem.
Personally I hate progress bars. They are never right. Ones that move fast at the beginning trick you into sitting and watching it, because you think they will be done soon. But they usually hang at the end, making me mad, and I think “Thanks for tricking me into sitting here, I could have gotten up and done something else.” I would prefer a blanket “This will take 5-10 minutes depending on your machine.” That way I can multi-task. That is the true efficiency lost.
If you don’t read an entire file into memory before writing it, you’ll waste time by stepping the head back/forth between source and destination. This is extremely expensive compared to the write speed.
@Frans Bouma: I have Windows XP SP2. If I connect my camera via USB, and copy files to the disk, it loads the whole file in memory. One of the worst bugs I have seen… No problem with 2MB pictures, but took many minutes of swap thrashing when I copied a video file larger than my physical memory.
The idea is loading bigger chunks, not the whole file .
I agree with brian above
progress bars that lie are the worst
123232534 hours is unhelpful
calculating time remaining is useless
10 minutes when it will take 5 is unhelpful
5 minutes when it will take 10 is useless
The best ones I have seen are the ones that just cycle (rather like the spinner mentioned above) it says “ok ok I’m doing it as fast as I can”
But beware of lying spinners: the File copy animation is one of these it is unconnected with the actual file copy operation so it can be showing the pretty animation of a file flying across when in reality it is actually doing nothing, and eventually shows a timeout error …
Dunno if you guys thought of this either, but the iPhone seems like it’s the fastest performing smartphone on the market, when in reality it’s just the most clever at hiding performance clogs. Rather than put the presentation layer somewhere beneath other “more important” layers, the presentation layer is seen as something UBER necessary, and as such it is prioritized higher than other OS level dependencies.
That’s why the iPhone seems so much better than windows mobile, just because it seems faster, regardless of actual specs.
Who cares about Windows Vista!? There’s a bigger point here, and it’s one that I found independently in the past.
We had an intranet app that blocked until a process was completed. The duration of this scaled with the number of items selected to process. In some cases, it could take 20 minutes to a half hour.
People used to tell me that they were sitting at their desk watching their IE progress bar, and it had “stopped at about 80%” even though it was still running. No matter how many times I told them that this progress bar meant nothing in this context, they still went by it.
So we decided to build a background processing subsystem where these requests would launch a background process, returning a confirmation screen immediately. We’re using PHP on Linux, so this was easy. We then gave them a page to review all of their running background processes, view results, etc.
After more than a year, I still get comments about how much faster it is now, even though I know it’s slower due to increased load on the server from other projects. In this case, they now have an accurate progress bar (even if it requires them refreshing their status page.)
Additionally, they could have multi-tasked just as well if they had opened up a second IE window, but this concept seemed to defy reality for them.
I must add something about Explorer. And before I even say anything, I’d like to say that I never did use Vista. I went from XP to OSX and never turned back.
OSX I noticed early on, has some really awesome icon management. Icons are big, and not only are they big, they are actually very articulate. I mean by this that actual thumb nails of the files are displayed as large as 128 pixels wide. Thumbnails of anything… images obviously, but even web pages or text files, or excel documents.
This kinda befuddled me because I remember working on a Shell extension on windows that would do this sort of thing, and remembering just how fricking slow it was. Same thing when you (in XP) set the folder type to contain music files for example.
Then it hit me. It’s because finder does it in the background. And very lazily. Say you have a folder full of 1000 files, if Finder doesn’t know what the second page looks like, it does not stop you from scrolling forward. Not that Explorer prevents you, but it does slow the system down to a halt and you hear the grinding of the folder being processed.
I often have a big reorganize of my files as i am sure alot of you do. This usually means multiple copy operations running. Why is there no option to pause copy operations so I can run them in order as they complete to avoid the disk head jumping around all over the place slowing all the operations.
Better still let’s have an intelligent copy queue so copy operations using the same discs are queued for speed but for instance a network or internet download would run concurrently as it would require less disc resources and you generally want maximum performance off a network resource. Also if a second disc to disc transfer was requested and it used different discs to the first it could run at the same time.
I hope I have explained that ok.
Mike, moving to OS X just because Explorer sucks seems a bit drastic, if that’s what you are suggesting. 
Judging by the number of people who beg for an OS X port of Directory Opus (the Windows file manager I help answer questions on) I can only imagine that Finder isn’t great, either.
Explorer does suck very much on Vista, though, I can’t argue with that. The UI is an ergonomic nightmare with it taking multiple clicks to toggle the preview panel, them removing the parent button (breadcrumbs are useful, but the parent button is usually far more convenient and it’s always in the same place), and forced full-row selection making deselection and folder-context menus difficult to reach… Not to mention the crappy file copy performance prior to SP1 (which only affects Explorer and a few of the lesser file managers which use CopyFileEx instead of their own file copying routines).
I suspect one of the reasons I like (or at least do not dislike) Vista so much compared to other people is that I don’t use Explorer. The rest of the OS is actually pretty good, or at least no worse than XP, IMO.
When I want to copy/move lots of files in XP or Vista, It was much faster to open cmd and issue a command: copy or xcopy or move …
Hi, all. I am not a programmer, but i have a question relating to vista file copy speed.
If it has problems copying due to its i/o buffer or whatever it is. Surely this will have effect on the read times and thus loading times. So I see it was mentioned that they went back to xp algorithm I can see no real evidence of that. Yes the speed has improved but it is still slow.
I backup my 1tb of data from my two internal driver to a firewire 800 external hdd. Now under Xp this takes about 3.5 hours. Under vista sp1 it takes… over 16 hours. Which personally i dont want to wait for.
Anyway, I shall be stopping with XP until someone mods vista until it works and a reasonable OS. However I do feel it will be another WinMe experience…
What is amazing is that with faster computers and hardware things haven’t gotten much faster than the old 33mhz workhorses of old. Files have gotten bigger and the pleasure of the operating system handling these files has gotten better. I, personally, hated the folder actions in mac os x when it wanted to open every file in that preview windows. 10.5 made it a lot better, but it takes heaps more time to open the preview (when i actually want it). I suspect there is just a convenient delay. Ahh, the glory of PEBKAC.
I laughed when I saw that different kinds of progress bars seemed faster. I myself find it very difficult to write progress bars in programming. Sometimes it is just trial and error to see what takes the most time. I then just fudge the numbers and have it look like it is smoothly progressing to 99% when in reality there are 17 things to complete and they all take different amounts of time.
Please people , if your doing anything more than 50 files or 100meg, use a dedicated file copy program from MS (they should have had this built in)
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/10/25/synctoy-2-0/
Yes its sad that it uses a micro MsSQL db, but its .net
It copies well and fast. Basically a copy of unix RSYNC which is good though probably not aware of the media types to adjust algos.
Or use rsync win32, or visaversa.
I do think MS should force their developers to use OSX daily to see what to aspire to.
While we’re on the subject of files, can anyone tell me why XP/Vista takes so long to delete the bloody things? Why does XP have to “calculate” before deleting? Grrrrr.
Sorry KG, that (copying time takes just adding up the bytes and dividing by bytes/sec) turns out to be wildly inaccurate (I’ve tried it). The start and stop takes far longer than copying bytes onto the end of the same file.
Give me a break. Forgive me for providing a perceived troll, but the performance is still crap, perceived or no. Alternate file systems like ext3 and reiserfs have already proven that the Microsoft method of file systems is inefficient at best, and outright grotesque at worst. But I wonder how much of this article was a payout from MS. Hmmm…