Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files 661
ta bu shi da yu writes "It appears that, incredibly, Vista can run out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but that 'often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly.' Apparently a fix was scheduled for SP1 but didn't make it; there is a hotfix that you must request."
Re:Welcome to Windows Vista (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
I have 13K+ music tracks on a backup disk. If I try to copy them with the Explorer UI, it does nothing - No error message or anything. I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine. You must be doing the same thing. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that?
Bullshit. (Score:1, Interesting)
Even though I plan to slap Ubuntu on this laptop the moment I hear linux has perfect power management support for it, I still have given Vista a fair shake. Methinks this has little to do with Vista itself and more to do with antivirus products sucking, as they always have. I've got no love for an industry that can only keep itself afloat by never perfectly solving the problem it exists to solve.
I'm a little suspicious (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just wondering if perhaps there isn't more to this than just "OMG Vista runs out of memory!" If it is a memory issue, why then haven't I encountered it, doing far larger amounts of files?
Re:Vista (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:3, Interesting)
To ensure backward comparabillity. I'm a techno luddite. I got my first DVD drive this year and was slow to get CD drives. All my systems have floppy drives.
98 can be made to puke copying a big file from a floppy. If the floppy is bad you may as well reboot. Delete a few gigs from a hard drive and it goes awy for ages and will more often then not kill the gui task. This is very repeatable. Again, if the CD is bad, reboot.
I can make XP croak as well copying huge files from a CD or floppy which is handles very very badly (see 98). And my biggest drive is 20G (albeit a damn fast one). It seems to do ok copying big files from hard disk to hard disk but even with SCSI RAID with huge caches and the correct drivers you can't expect much left of your CPU when its doing this. Do two at once and you may as well go rebuild your transmission while you're waiting. Apparantly DMA and interrupts are unknown concepts at Redmond; PDP-11's did this just fine (unless you turned off DMA and interrupts in which case it was no faster than a 4Mhz Z-80 CP/M system)
There's really no excuse for this. In the days of 8 bit microprocessor systems we still went out and got the biggest pre-production drives we could to see if they'd copy ok. They may have filled a room but the Navy did indeed have 100 megs online pumping its data through an 8085. Eventually. We knew it'd work cause we tried it. This was 1981.
This is why they use real (IBM, SUN) computers to serve up say, the root or com zone. The root zone isn't big but the com zone is. Copying it isn't a problem on any unix system I've tried, just don't try to load it into BIND on anything but a massive computer or it'll just hang. And not gracefully either.
Windows is for games and sometimes works well enough to run some office tools. As long as you don't need accuracy.
Big files or LOTS of small files are a problem for computers. This isn't news folks. It's just sloppy carelessness.
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a lot of the problems I've noticed with XP is related to the stupid fucking way that Windows handles it's file cache. It will literally swap out PROGRAMS YOU ARE ACTIVELY USING to expand the file cache during a large copy/read operation.
Anybody that has ever tried to alt-tab while copying huge files knows about this.... then you sit and wait for the pages to be swapped back into memory. And you might as well get some coffee, cuz with the hard drive already being pegged for the copy operation, it's gonna take awhile. Oh, and once it's finally done and you need to alt-tab back to the original program.... well, hope you need more coffee.
Lately I've been playing with a program called CachemanXP. Google it. It seems to give you more control over the memory and process management functions of Windows. It also lets you do a 'kill -9' equiv, which (as far as I'm aware) even Task Manager won't do, as it insists on trying to do a graceful shutdown first.
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:3, Interesting)
SYMPTOMS
If a computer that is running any of the versions of Windows that are listed above contains more than 512 megabytes (for example, 768 megabytes) of physical memory (RAM), you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:
You may be unable to open an MS-DOS session (or command prompt) while Windows is running.
The computer may stop responding (hang) while Windows is starting, or halt and display the following error message:
Here is one of their suggested workarounds:
Reduce the amount of memory that is installed in your computer to 512 MB or less.
Here is their support article on it http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q253912&ID=KB;EN-US;Q253912 [microsoft.com]
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:4, Interesting)
That sort of depends if you are talking average home user or average work user. The average home user may actually have this kind of problem - since downloads to the tmp directory are then copied to the correct folder once downloads are complete. Update EQII, WOW & FFXI & you've gone a long ways towards 16K files. Add in patch Tuesday, and your average user is probably going to hit real close to 16K files if they try to keep the PC up for a month.
I probably come reasonably close to 16K files copied in a week on my work PC, so a crash like that would hit me every other week or so - not something I would consider 'Enterprise Ready'.
MS has a habit of programming for the home environment & pushing it into the Business environment.
Re:not 16,400 (Score:2, Interesting)
mkdir copy
cp filename.* copy/
bash:
All these artificial limits are stupid and sure Vista is even more broken, but Unix has had this kind of problem for decades and instead of fixing it (ala plan 9) they just came up with stuff to work around it (xargs).
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course there were always ways around it.
Re:Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe this stems from... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file.
Which is sad, because clearly its not required for the OS to have these problems, but they exhibit these problems in the GUI shell, where the vast vast majority of people will encounter them.
Re:Honest question (Score:3, Interesting)
but sadly I suspect you are right, apps are king and once vista is the only version of windows that is reasonablly availible people will use it whether they like it or not.
Re:Billy G says (Score:3, Interesting)
It was also pretty hard to believe MS when they stated that the Mac OS had little to do with the development of Windows when they hired UI Design artists like Susan Kare who worked on the Mac UI. Check out this site: http://www.kare.com/portfolio.html [kare.com]
Strangely I see a lot of parallels between Apple and Microsoft during the Vista development. When Apple was developing Copeland, the next generation Mac OS, release dates kept slipping and grand features would pop up and disappear just as quickly. Apple had lost its way, which was great because Jobs came back and Copeland was dumped and NextOS was made into OS X. Which gives me the power of Mac OS and Unix as well.
I really think Microsoft should have dumped vista and started from scratch on a new Windows OS. I think Longhorn was Microsofts Copeland and they made the wrong decision. I have two XP boxes running XP SP2 and I won't be upgrading those to Vista anytime soon. I am even running XP on my mac laptop with parallels desktop. Time will tell if they can make Vista into something better but every PC I have been around lately is still running XP.