Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Windows 7 Beta Network Performance

One of my major complaints about Vista has been the network performance problems, or atleast what seemed to be network performance problems. I worked with a couple of guys at work on testing network performance with XP, Vista and Windows 7 Beta. We created following script to test with.

net use N: file://servername/C$/Test
mkdir ST
echo Start,%time% >> Results.csv
copy N:\ReportViewer.exe ST\RV.exe
echo Small,%time% >> Results.csv
copy N:\office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe ST\of.exe
echo Big,%time% >> Results.csv
echo F1,=B2-B1 >> Results.csv
echo F2,=B3-B2 >> Results.csv
del ST\RV.exe
del ST\OF.exe
rmdir ST
net use /delete N: /y

I used a Windows 2003 Server and a Windows 2008 Server for testing.

Here are the results:

I was shocked by the performance of Windows 7 downloading from Windows 2003 server. I hope that Microsoft works on this. Remember that this is a Beta and we will have to wait until RTM to determine the real performance. I am very impressed with the perfromance of Windows 7 and Windows 2008 server. Hopefully this does not change in the RTM.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I see you are using the copy command would XCopy be any different? Sorry I am definitely showing my age for asking this question. In the past copy was slow because it would copy bits of the file immediately while XCopy would cache a bigger chunk to memory before it actually copied the file to the Hard Drive.

Jarle said...

Actually, what you'd want to use is "robocopy", and not xcopy nor regular copy.
IMHO :)

Adventures in Tech said...

raps_388, I have not tried XCopy. Jarle, you are right Robocopy is much better. I was wanting to test the standard copy though. I use robocopy often. I am a big fan!!

Dave said...

I got a 1st hand taste of the slow network copy performance in Win7 today. I had to copy a few GB's from a users XP box to my Win7 box for backup to DVD. Let's just say I hope the copy is finished when I get in tomorrow morning.

mspellman said...

Try the same copy from a Linux/Unix system. You will be amazed at the difference. I tried copying a large directory (17 Gb) to my Windows Home Server from WinXp and Win7 and the performance was horrible. So I copied the same files to WHS from my NAS box (BSD based) and Mint Linux (Debian based) and the difference was incredible. Even the copies between WinXP and the NAS box were a whole lot faster. Seems Windows talks better to Samba than itself.

Unknown said...

I haven't tested this yet and going to work with our engineers. We are testing Windows 7 with our CAD designers using Solidworks 2009 x64 and we did see the network speed decrease in opening files, from Windows XP x64. I found the followling link that is for Vista, but thought why not try it se what happens. http://www.pctipsbox.com/speed-up-windows-vista-network-performance-with-tcp-windows-tuning/

Unknown said...

I haven't tested this yet and going to work with our engineers. We are testing Windows 7 with our CAD designers using Solidworks 2009 x64 and we did see the network speed decrease in opening files, from Windows XP x64. I found the followling link that is for Vista, but thought why not try it se what happens. http://www.pctipsbox.com/speed-up-windows-vista-network-performance-with-tcp-windows-tuning/