Is the August update important?

In the last episode of ,
Char Jackson said:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:12:07 -0700, DevilsPGD
wrote:

In the last episode of ,
Roderick Stewart said:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 10:51:26 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

And 8.1 was free to all, and it cleaned up a lot of the rough edges of
using a non-touch interface.

I'm not so sure it's the same great OS under the ugly surface, with the
oft-discussed deficiencies of Task Manager being front and center, but
another thing that's different about 8.x is that emptying the Recycle Bin
takes far longer than it used to. Is this a time critical task? No, of
course not, unless your life is an episode of 24 and you need to get stuff
deleted before the bad guys break down the door, but it's indicative of the
general inefficiency that I see on a regular basis.

For example, with 8000 items totaling about 400GB, it used to take about 2
seconds to empty the Recycle Bin in XP, about 15-20 seconds in 7, and about
2 minutes in 8.x. What sort of rubs it in your face is that 8.x includes a
status line for "deleted items per second" which usually reads somewhere in
the range of 0 to 3. I can't imagine what must be going on in the background
that forces file deletion to be that slow. It's not a matter of refreshing
the window after each deletion, so it must be something else.

Perhaps it's actually overwriting the deleted files as a security
feature, instead of simply deleting entries from the file table? If
so, it really is an improvement, even though it takes longer.

It might be issuing SSD TRIM instructions, this instruction requires an
operation per cluster that the file used, whereas a normal "delete" is
nothing of the sort, it's just a "Remove the file from the allocation
tables"

Good guess, but I don't think that's it. The laptop came with a spinning
drive, but I upgraded to a Samsung 840 EVO Pro a few months ago. I see
significant performance improvements everywhere else, but deleting files
wasn't significantly affected. TRIM obviously wouldn't have been applicable
pre-SSD.

Pre-SSD, you'd have several separate file operation for every single
delete, so it is expected that deletes would take some time.

IIRC, previous versions of Windows would batch these through the disk
cache, while current versions don't buffer or cache deletes and instead
perform them in real time, so the only real difference is that the UI
stays visible, whereas before it would "complete" and finish in the
background.

This is similar to file copying, which moved from buffered to
unbuffered, so it appears to take longer from a UI perspective, rather
than actually going slightly (mostly imperceptibly) faster (due to
larger block sizes, and a few other minor optimizations)

SSDs speed up nearly everything, but deletes are a special case since
the TRIM instruction is surprisingly slow given that most drives don't
actually perform the TRIM operation immediately, and instead just flag
the physical block for a subsequent garbage collection when idle.

--
The Dalai Lama visited the White House and told the president that
he could teach him to find a higher state of consciousness.

Then after talking to Bush for a few minutes, he said,
"You know what? Let's just grab lunch."

-- Bill Maher

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014 11:17:02 -0700, "Gene E. Bloch"
wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:32:46 -0500, Char Jackson wrote:

Lastly, I
could also do a Shift-Delete and bypass the Recycle Bin, but that too has
its risks.

After many years of always using Shift-Del, I finally decided to use Del
alone.

You could say that I finally acknowledged what a klutz I am...or at
least that Shift-Del has its risks.

I know. :-) In my case, there have been a few times where I've deleted
something because I thought I was done with it, but the next day a colleague
asks for it for one reason or another, so I've been glad to have that safety
net. Projects seldom bleed into the next week, however, so I can pretty
safely assume everything can be deleted over the weekend.

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 16:08:00 -0400, Paul wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 21:36:07 -0700, DevilsPGD
wrote:

In the last episode of , Silver Slimer
said:

On 14-10-08 03:30 PM, Ron wrote:

I'm not downloading anything until it is officially released. If I don't
like it I will put this machine back to Windows 8, but it HAS to be
better than 8.
You have to have a very open mind to like Windows 8. Luckily, I have
that. However, let's be honest: it wasn't that bad. The Modern interface
scared most people away but underneath that, the same great operating
system was available for anyone wanting to use it.
And 8.1 was free to all, and it cleaned up a lot of the rough edges of
using a non-touch interface.

I'm not so sure it's the same great OS under the ugly surface, with the
oft-discussed deficiencies of Task Manager being front and center, but
another thing that's different about 8.x is that emptying the Recycle Bin
takes far longer than it used to. Is this a time critical task? No, of
course not, unless your life is an episode of 24 and you need to get stuff
deleted before the bad guys break down the door, but it's indicative of the
general inefficiency that I see on a regular basis.

For example, with 8000 items totaling about 400GB, it used to take about 2
seconds to empty the Recycle Bin in XP, about 15-20 seconds in 7, and about
2 minutes in 8.x. What sort of rubs it in your face is that 8.x includes a
status line for "deleted items per second" which usually reads somewhere in
the range of 0 to 3. I can't imagine what must be going on in the background
that forces file deletion to be that slow. It's not a matter of refreshing
the window after each deletion, so it must be something else.


Maybe you could try Sysinternals "procmon" (Process Monitor), turn off the filters
and watch everything that happens while the Recycle Bin is cleared. Perhaps
Explorer is "lighting up" file shares, for each file deleted. Without
visually refreshing the window. When the Bin is empty, stop the trace
via the tick box in the File menu, then go back and review the trace.
On Windows XP Professional on my Dell Precision 380s with Pentium
D 2.8GHz, 4GB physical memory I have noticed that
sometimes when lots of files are being Empty'ed
from the Recycle Bin one CPU can saturate without the disk
getting very busy.

I used to be able to speed things up by booting, but for
the last year or so on some of my systems I always see the
slow performance. ("slow" is about a factor of 10 for a
10K RPM drive. It also slows down SSDs, but I don't have
any idea of how much.)

The high CPU problem happens even when the files are not
fragmented. It also happens with files small enough to
be entirely in the metadata.

Note: On systems without the problem that causes
deleting files to take lot of CPU time, working in TrueCrypt
volume on a disk using provides a good (5X?) speed up compared to
using the (10K RPM) drive directly. I haven't done any
timing with SSDs directly versus TrueCrypt volumes
on the SSD.

Note: With spinning drives and probably more so with
SSDs, you should try not to add a large number of
files temporarily. The last entry used in the MFT
is increased permanently, which slows down lots of
things. (In the dim past [perhaps only with FAT32]
there were disk defrag programs that could shrink the
metadata tables and lower the last entry used number.
I don't think there is a program to fix things now
for NTFS.)
grows and
probably doesn't shrink, an

Also saturate 1 CPU use when files are deleted
without going to the recycle bin. Also happens when deleting
many files to the Recycle Bin [as contrasted with deleting
a folder containing many files.])

I don't know if this behavior happens with Windows 7,
and I haven't tried 8 and 10.

What I like about Windows, is you can set up a RAM Disk, expect
lightning fast response, and things are just as slow as your
hard drive. Further evidence that the process overhead,
process priority, or event throttling, exact a heavy toll.
It's one reason I don't use my RamDisk all that often.
The only advantage it's got, is not fragmenting some
other file system. I can extract a 60,000 file tarball
to the RAMDisk temporarily, and since the RAMDisk is formatted
on each bootup, there are no side effects to speak of. Any
fragmentation disappears when the power goes off.

Paul

Mark F wrote:

The last entry used in the MFT
is increased permanently, which slows down lots of
things.

You can find lots of well-meaning advice out there.

http://superuser.com/questions/31600...n-an-ntfs-disk

I know a commercial defragmenter program can perform miracles.
With things like "contig", all you can do is test them,
see that they fail, and move on.

I would not expect the $MFT to be easy to manipulate, without
some sort of special code to handle it.

When I need to clean up a file system, for me at least,
it's just easier to copy off all the files, copy them
back after the partition is formatted, and clean up
any damage after that (fixboot for the pbr or whatever).
In many cases, this is faster than unleashing a defragmenter
to sit there grinding on the disk for hours. To make that
possible, it helps to have a dual boot system, with one
OS per disk drive.

*******

As for CPU usage, consider whether any Search Indexers,
or AV software are running. Some AVs examine any file
opened for read.

And to make this topical, on Windows 8, plenty of activities
on the OS, serve to "shoot a process in the foot". I used
the Disk Cleanup function one day. It had taken *an hour*
so far, to do the Disk Cleanup. I opened Task Manager,
and could see TiWorker running (trusted installer worker,
related to Windows Update). It was opening every package
ever installed on the disk. On a hunch, I started Windows Update
and pretended to be checking for updates. This causes the
rampant TiWorker process to stop what it was doing. The
Disk Cleanup promptly finished two minutes later.

The more modern the OS, the more often you have to open
Task Manager, and see what errant gun fire in the pits,
is shooting the performance in the foot. I absolutely
*hate* an OS design, that runs off and does stuff when
I want my own stuff to run fast.

The Search Indexer is an example of a set of processes
that won't take no for an answer. Even selecting "Pause"
does not guarantee they won't be screwing around on you. And
the Services are set up, such that the Search Indexer will
attempt three times to restart itself, if you had the idea
of just killing it from Task Manager.

It's like a 747, with a complicated control panel to operate,
and the wheels lower themselves when you're at cruise altitude.
Unless you notice, and raise the wheels again. Everyone
knows the wheels are more important, than getting
to your destination on time (/s). And the wheels should be
able to lower themselves, unannounced. Like a naughty child.
That's modern OS design in a nutshell.

Paul