Poor Network Performance with Windows Vista (RTM)
I have spent the better part of my free time struggling with Windows Vista and the ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard which has two Marvell Yukon Gig-E network interfaces.
I recently replaced an older machine with a new machine and was achieving only 5-10MB/sec transfer rates between the machine or ~<5-10Mb/second.
So my performance benchmarks are not scientific at all, I was just using the Vista copy information and resource monitor to get a general idea of the relative performance.
My new setup is two PCs with the exact same motherboard. Both machines have 4GB, 8GB RAM and Core 2 Duo E6600 and Q6600 respectively. Both machine are using two Seagate 320GB 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0. I also have the machines connected to a Linksys GIG-E switch...
Local file copy between my RAID 0 drives is 76MB/sec (small files) to 320MB/sec (large files). So the network in all cases should be the bottleneck.
I read a bunch of articles talking about setting some of the tcp parameters using the following commands...
netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=enabled
netsh interface tcp show global
But these commands didn't seem to do anything significant.
Finally I found the following hotfix...
The copy process may stop responding when you try to copy files from a server on a network to a Windows Vista-based computer
I installed it and it worked like a charm. Now I am getting something like 40-60MB/sec transfer rates over my GIG-E network...
Funny how other people are having similar problems at the same time...maybe the hotfix enables SMB2, w/o installing SP1 as disscussed in infinitely better detail by Scott.
-Alex