Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files

Bruce Schneier has said that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. With Vista, Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job of making premium content files not copyable. Now a few readers have tipped us to a new wrinkle: Vista also makes it very, very slow to copy, rename, or delete ordinary files. Here is a Microsoft TechNet thread on the problem. The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely. And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.

Confirmed!

I can confirm this. Copying a 10MB file from one directory to another on the same partition, on a fast 7200rpm 16mb cache SATA 1.5gb/s hard drive, can take 5-10 seconds, whereas it's instant on XP for me.

Re:Confirmed!

Egads, what a piece of JUNK.

What in the *hell* is the point of a pretty interface for your operating system, when it won't carry out basic operating system tasks efficiently?

Of course, I'm not *really* asking this question, since we all know that the point of Windows upgrades isn't to improve our experience, but to drive the purchase of new hardware, that will require new software, that will drive Microsoft's numbers up. That being said, this sort of thing is just completely unacceptable. Copying files is amongst the most basic things a computer can be asked to do.

Re:Confirmed!

What in the *hell* is the point of a pretty interface for your operating system, when it won't carry out basic operating system tasks efficiently?

The way you wrote that, you were asking for a flamebait mod.

However, I agree with you in spirit. I was helping a friend transfer files from an XP machine to her new Vista machine. I noticed file transfer was extremely slow (was glad to see this article, I thought it was me). Yada yada.

The real mind blower for me, though, was more in line with your post. The simple act of inserting my thumb drive caused explorer to lock up for a while (assuming this, since the taskbar, all other windows, etc, were inoperable). It locked up for about 2 minutes the first time, then after that it would lock up for about ten seconds each time I inserted the drive, thus preventing preventing me from doing anything. As I waited in in front of my friend's PC, totally exasperated, I was quite bemused by the fact that her sidebar was clicking along perfectly. The slideshow was reloading a new picture every few seconds, the transition effects were working perfectly, he analog clock was working, etc.

So there you go -- while it doesn't validate the flamie-ness of your post, it does vindicate your point at least anecdotally. Vista seems to be designed to protect the flashy useless crap at the expense of core tasks (like, you know, explorer). If a task like explorer is having trouble, then resources should be diverted from other resources to help. Or, core tasks should bullet-proof. Or, MS should have concentrated on core tasks rather than flashy widgets like the sidebar. I dunno, but something seemed to be a bit mis-prioritized.

Re:Confirmed!

5-10 seconds? That's really fast! Try this on a dual boot system with 2 partitions, XP on C and Vista on D: double click a ZIP file on your XP partition from inside Vista and copy the files inside the ZIP to your Vista D partition (which shows up as C anyway). I got a whopping 8-30 bytes per second that way recently and waited about 10 minutes for a few images to crawl from the XP partition ZIP temp folder to the Vista partition. I didn't try if copying the zip to the Vista partition first would speed things up, but I guess it would have helped a little.

Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.

Re:Confirmed!

Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.

My question is: for all users, or some...? I really doubt this happens everywhere, I had the Vista RC2 until recently on my modest machine and copying/moving was as fast as on XP (i.e. normal).

Generalizing that in Vista these are slow kinda skews the issue: quite possibly this is not just unfixable bloat, but is caused by something specific and will be fixed in the coming weeks.

Obligatory old reference

Finally, a chance to turn the tables...


I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Dell (a Core 2 Duo w/1 Gig of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my G3 iMac, running OS9.2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.


(the original rant) [kottke.org]

I just tried

I can't seem to reproduce your problem. Copying a 10MB file is instant, extracting a 10MB zip across drives takes about 4 seconds. This is on a machine that scores a 1 on the "Windows Experience Index".

Re:I just tried

For those unwilling to read the forums (or who block all MS sites at their router), the problem relates to Vista making thumbnails of files, and trying to continue making them even when you have told it to delete a file, its not a transfer speed problem, and can be VERY easily stop gapped by disabling thumbnail views in the folder view settings :)

The thing I personally have a problem with in vista is folder browsing, I have not spent money on a good raid array (and made sure it had vista drivers) and lots of HDD just to have a half second pause when I double click ANY folder.

Re:I just tried

In Linux, when you delete a file, it gets deleted. I don't know exactly how this works under the covers... maybe Linux pretends to delete it until everyone lets go and then deletes it for real, the difference is, you don't have sit around and struggle to tell the computer you want to delete a flippin' file, or give up and come back later.

The way in which it is handled in Unix in general is that the link count is decremented. When the link count is decremented to 0, the file can no longer be accessed, as in new requests. However, the system keeps the file open and the blocks marked as in use until the last application with the file open lets go of it. Then the blocks are marked free. If the system goes down while a process is still holding the file open, and thus the blocks are marked as being in use, you will need to fsck to free those blocks for use. Journaling filesystems worth using will figure it out for themselves.

Re:Confirmed!

Moving/copying a lot of large files is very suspicious behavior. The compliant and well-behaved user who leaves things where they are supposed to be should only rarely have to do that. Perhaps Microsoft is slowing down the process to give you time to reflect on the error of your ways (or maybe to think about switching to a different OS)...

Re:Confirmed!

Attempting to delete large numbers of files under XP sets one up to wait quite a while for the OS while it is "preparing to delete", and Vista makes this slower? WTF is "preparing to delete", anyway? Does it really take that long to generate an "Are you sure?" dialog?

Re:Confirmed!

WTF is "preparing to delete", anyway?

Dark Helmet: Why are we always "preparing"? Just go.
Colonel Sandurz: Just go.

Re:Confirmed!

This just in! An extremely common and necessary file operation takes about 10 times longer to do in Vista on the exact same hardware! Trust me, it's _really_ annoying. Oh, and this is Slashdot, of course there will be an article about every little thing ;-)

Re:Confirmed!

Even XP takes a lot longer to copy files than Linux, for example...It's just an artifact of the file system. I use a Linux server to back up my Windows machines, and I've seen it a hundred times...Ten minutes to copy up, a hour to copy down.

I don't necessarily think it's Microsoft out to screw people, it's just that they store a frickton of file information...I mean, it's undelete information, and fragmentation information, and system restore information...That's just the way Windows works, and it's the way it's always worked, and comparing it to something like Linux or OS X where the file system doesn't contain all that overhead, it's an apples to oranges comparison.

Re:Confirmed!

While it's very true that ext3 (for example) in Linux is way faster at copying than NTFS in XP, this particular issue with Vista shouldn't be with the filesystem - it uses the same NTFS that XP uses (at least, I'm able to read/write Vista NTFS partitions from within XP...)

Re:Confirmed!

I'll bet they've added some more fricking metadata...They spent all that work trying to come up with a database filesystem...You know they didn't just toss all of that code. Also, they have all that "search your hard drive" functionality built in to compete with spotlight, so it has to index and categorize files, etc, etc, so your searches seem quick and responsive.

Just a bunch of bloat. Move the bits first, then go back and do the rest of that stuff during system slack time, but Windows does everything on the fly...Or on the crawl, as it were.

Re:Confirmed!

You should keep care to know that the copy operation hasn't completed necessarily under Linux. A good example is ext 3, where it can take as much as 5 seconds before it even thinks of writing the log to the disc.

Try doing a sync after you have made a copy of a file - the operation isn't over until sync completes.

Re:Confirmed!

With something so basic and fundamental, yes, it will be reported on /. It indicates MS completely blew QA on Vista, which isn't surprising since they were going to ship in Jan come hell or high water. Another delay was absolutely not acceptable, as Vista delays have already made them a laughing stock among some, and more importantly was shaking confidence in others.

I think we will see that rushing out an incomplete and untested product is a sure way remove confidence. Evidently MS hasn't learned from their "only use odd-numbered service packs" mantra that used to exist among many of us. Why was that? Because the odd numbered SPs fixed the issues of the even numbered SPs, including the initial release.

Re:Confirmed!

Seems Vista's security initiative paid off. No security-related issues to report so Slashdot begins posting headlines about every little twitch that Vista suffers as a serious issue.

Re:Confirmed!

But how do you miss a fundamental core process? That's like hmm, should we see if IE7 connects to the internet? Naah, no need, of course it does.

I've noticed issues with Explorer deleting/copying/moving files (since the IE switchover). This is in XP btw, not Vista, so I'm not so sure that it's due to rebuilding anything. It's bad enough that I drop to the command line when I have a particularly large directory tree of files to delete or copy (we're talking a few 10s of thousands of files here in a heavily treed directory structure). Takes almost no time from the command line. Whatever explorer does adds eons (in computing time) to the process.

Isn't the big "secret" of Vista that they actually didn't rebuild so much of it, but took the 2003 server codebase to start from and yet again slapped "pretty" on it?

Re:Confirmed!

oh for heavens sake. In QA it is impossible to catch everything.

Well QA departments usually maintains a serie of tests and run them on various architectures and measure the time taken by each test. Trying to copy/erase/rename files seems like a basic operation you don't want regression on, so it is probably part of a test. The fact that such a thing wasn't caught on a flag product just amaze me.

Agreed, it should not *too greatly* affect anyone. But you have to admit that when you have bought Vista for a fistful of dollars, probably bought a recent computer to make it work, you have the right to be annoyed when a basic operation is slower than on an older machine, with an older OS.

In fact, on linux, I wouldn't care much and would agree with the "oops, sorry here is a fix" because I didn't pay for that, because the developer wasn't paid to write the soft and wasn't forced to release a fix, so yeah, there is a bias and it has some good justifications.

Also I don't know what kind of uses you have with your computer, but copying or moving 10+ MB files happen all the time. If you are a gamer, a creator, a film/music down... consumer, hell, even if you are a MS Office user, 10Mb is insanely easy to reach.

Re:Confirmed!

Sorry but I have to disagree.
This will impact any user that copies files to their system. It also looks as if it is a problem with the DRM a "feature" that doesn't benefit the people that actually pay for the software at all.
Also that hot fix is only available to average users that call up and ask for it.
The one thing you have almost correct is that people should have waited until Vista proves it's self. Everybody should wait until Vista proves it's self. I really don't see any reason to run Vista if you are not a developer. The really cool new API is available for XP if you install .NET 3.0 What I really don't like is that Microsoft is making it hard for average people to buy systems with XP on it. They shouldn't be forcing people to Vista since it clearly isn't ready yet.

re: Simple QA issue?

I agree. This is an issue that will eventually be corrected in a service pack. (Pretty much anything that starts out in hotfixes ends up in a service pack.) It's not like this is going to be a permanent problem/curse of using Vista.

BUT - the big reason I see for pointing it out to the "general Vista using public" is to make people more aware of the added complexity and potential headaches DRM brings to the table. Until manufacturers give up on the idea of protecting digital content through DRM measures, we're going to keep running into incompatibility problems, performance issues, and other nasty side-effects in the products we use.

Re:Confirmed!

oh for heavens sake. In QA it is impossible to catch everything, in fact I'm impressed vista works as well as it does considering they rebuilt so much of it.

Remember that Vista has been in development for what, 8 years? You'd expect basic stuff like copying files to work at least as well as it did in previous Windows versions by now...

Re:Confirmed!

I have this problem on Vista and it's not so much that it's unusual... it's more mind boggling.

I confuses me deeply... I hadn't thought to associate it with content protection. Now it's simply aggravating.

Copying a few files, no matter what the size, pops up a "Calculating transfer time" window... I'm talking files where the total sum is 10MB even. It's unnecessary.

The transfer itself will often go faster then the calculation. Apparently the calculation is doing more than just figuring out file transfer size.

Re:Confirmed!

Copying a few files, no matter what the size, pops up a "Calculating transfer time" window... I'm talking files where the total sum is 10MB even.

Do you see that with few larger files, or lots of smaller files?

I just did a few tests on Vista Ultimate x64 on an Athlon X2 3800+ machine with 2GB of RAM:

10 files totaling 10MB = instant
675 files totaling 5MB = about 15 seconds

The latter window popped up a "calculating remaining time" window, but I could see in the folder view that it was copying files the entire time. So it's not that it spent more time calculating than copying per se--it was calculating while it was copying, and didn't get a time estimate until it was almost done.

Re:Confirmed!

E6600 (Dual core 2.40) / 2G / Vista ultimate. Even a single file of under 1mb can take several seconds. However, I've noticed that this doesn't seem to happen if you're copying files in your own space, ie: desktop / documents folder / pictures folder / etc. However, copying a file from your own space to either a network drive of (heaven forbid) into your c: or somewhere else on the system, there seems to be a stupidly slow amount of time.

Sometimes it also seems that another process asking for UAC rights will completely stop a copy. I had one where I was copying a small file around and it took literally five minutes before I cancelled it, then I noticed that a program I was installing was asking for UAC rights. Not sure if they were related.

This definately isn't an issue of copying a million 1 byte files slowing the sytem down. This is copying a single 600k file around taking 20-30 seconds of 'caculating' and then it copies it.

I can understand that there's a lot of extra crap going on in the background with checking DRM rights, file permissions, ACLs, etc, but come on, programs are supposed to get faster as they come along, not slower.

obOfftopic: Wonder when someone will release a Vista-Lite with all the extra crap (processes / services) stripped out?

Why only a Hotfix and no patch?

For very very basic functionality?

What is Vista doing? Factoring large primes in 640KB RAM?

Re:Whah?

No that guy is just keeping the low level of bug reporting that all are doing in that technet thread.

If you did google for the "bug" you might have come accross this [neowin.net]

"Start >> Control Panel >> Programs and Features," Turn windows features on or off" ,Uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"

I think that is only for the network problems, not for the generic copy or delete problems (not sure, reports are not good)

I have seen also reports about vista that is has problems with large sparse files, but i haven't taken the time to reproduce. (will do later, but every 30 days it seems i have to evaluate windows vista again.... )

Re:Interesting...

...Why is Slashdot so slow to highlight glaring defects in Vista?

Actually, slashdot reported on this months ago; however, since the slashdot server is running on vista, it took this long to get inserted into the database.

WTF Register quote?

I realize "The Register" is the "National Enquirer" of IT, but what the heck does this quote in TFA mean: "it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM"
I've used Windows 2000 with only 256M of RAM and it's quite speedy...I've run a remote desktop session over a 56kbps link and although noticable, it's pretty speedy. (and yes, I've copied big files over that link)

How does mixing speed (bps) and RAM (M) work anyway? It's sorta like saying "I've driven my car 50kph with a cat,ferret, and dog in the back seat but when the seat covers are blue it seems really slow"

TDz.

Re:WTF Register quote?

I realize "The Register" is the "National Enquirer" of IT, but what the heck does this quote in TFA mean: "it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM"

Note the small m and b: it's not 256 megabyte, but 256 millibit. That's not a whole lot of memory.

Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses

I used to get frustrated waiting for large file copies in XP but Vista is horrible. I can't get it to un-sleep properly either. I'll drop the lid and open it later and hit a few keys. 2 minutes later the screen is still black so I'll try to shut it down or start it up and I wind up holding the start button for 10 seconds to get anything to work. It's also annoying that 90% of the time the battery is still drained when I shut the lid.

Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses

Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?

MS is pretty much mistaken when they thought people will blindly go for Vista when all they could offer as an improvement from XP was transparent windows. Bleh.

Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses

Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?

Shiny!!

Obligatory

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (an Intel Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my ancient Mac running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista PC that has run faster than its Mac OSX counterpart, despite the Vista PC's same chip architecture. My 286/12 with 2 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.4ghz mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

Vista lovers, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:Obligatory

One of these days somebody will make a statue of Natalie Portman and nobody will even care

I did. And she was naked. And petrifiedq, of course. I even put hot grits on it! Nobody cared. Very sad, indeed.

Insightful?!

How can this be insightful? This is a reworking of an old troll, which originally went like this:


I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.