Real hardware test

On 12/10/2014 02:08 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On 10 Dec 2014 08:46:39 GMT, "Jeff Gaines"
wrote:

On 09/12/2014 in message Char
Jackson wrote:

So how can we duplicate what you're seeing? How should we proceed toward a
solution?

Use Windows 7 (or Vista which had the same problems) and realise how slow
it is.

It's fine here, on each of my PCs that run it, so unless you can provide
some information on how to recreate the issue, I guess help will be hard to
come by. Good luck! Please let us know what you find.





I work on Win7 machines all the time and have never seen networking
problems.

The main complaint I have with all versions of Windows past XP are the
absurdly slow deletion times of large files.


"Discovering items" and "calculating free space" dialogs seemingly take
forever.


Win10 has if anything made things worse.

When I did an update, it put the previous build in "Windows.old" .

When I tried to delete it, the system went through an eight minute
deletion dialog which ended in a failure to delete.

After running disk cleanup three times, it finally "saw" the previous
installation and gave the option to delete it.

That worked, but from the time I tried to delete "windows.old" until the
time I got rid of it...was perhaps a half an hour or so.


There is no reason this should have taken longer than one second.

philo wrote:
On 12/10/2014 02:08 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On 10 Dec 2014 08:46:39 GMT, "Jeff Gaines"
wrote:

On 09/12/2014 in message
Char
Jackson wrote:

So how can we duplicate what you're seeing? How should we proceed
toward a
solution?

Use Windows 7 (or Vista which had the same problems) and realise how
slow
it is.

It's fine here, on each of my PCs that run it, so unless you can provide
some information on how to recreate the issue, I guess help will be
hard to
come by. Good luck! Please let us know what you find.





I work on Win7 machines all the time and have never seen networking
problems.

The main complaint I have with all versions of Windows past XP are the
absurdly slow deletion times of large files.


"Discovering items" and "calculating free space" dialogs seemingly take
forever.


Win10 has if anything made things worse.

When I did an update, it put the previous build in "Windows.old" .

When I tried to delete it, the system went through an eight minute
deletion dialog which ended in a failure to delete.

After running disk cleanup three times, it finally "saw" the previous
installation and gave the option to delete it.

That worked, but from the time I tried to delete "windows.old" until the
time I got rid of it...was perhaps a half an hour or so.


There is no reason this should have taken longer than one second.

It's the philosophy of the approach.

File system operations, they're done in small steps. If the
power goes off, there's no embarrassing mess that way. The
journal has a log of what was going on, for repair purposes.

To you or I, it seems a slam dunk, to just grab the FAT or
the $MFT, freeze system state for a microsecond, edit the
$MFT and zorch the set of files being deleted, then come
back again. But that would violate all the principles of
"slow and steady wins the race". There are permissions to be
checked, a "safety cushion" by moving the files to a temporary
place (Trash can), all that fun stuff. It's an entire
ceremony. Even comes with dancing paper animation.
You wouldn't want to put that army of software
developers out of work now, would you ?

At least you've learned your lesson, to use Disk Cleanup
for Windows.old. Deleting it "head on", is a mistake.
A mistake I learned the hard way.

What you should be finding, is Disk Cleanup runs a lot
faster in Win10 Preview, than it does in Win8 or Win7. So
it would seem somebody noticed what a shambles the previous
implementation was.

For the other OSes, while Disk Cleanup is running, open
Task Manager. If you see processes "competing" with your
Disk Cleanup, like tiworker, you can pretend to open
Windows Update and check for updates. And that may be
sufficient to stop the tiworker run. I've seen a few things
wasting cycles while Disk Cleanup is running, which could
account for the extra-long runtime in some cases.

Paul

On 12/11/2014 04:06 AM, Paul wrote:



sniped for brevity

After running disk cleanup three times, it finally "saw" the previous
installation and gave the option to delete it.

That worked, but from the time I tried to delete "windows.old" until
the time I got rid of it...was perhaps a half an hour or so.


There is no reason this should have taken longer than one second.

It's the philosophy of the approach.

File system operations, they're done in small steps. If the
power goes off, there's no embarrassing mess that way. The
journal has a log of what was going on, for repair purposes.

To you or I, it seems a slam dunk, to just grab the FAT or
the $MFT, freeze system state for a microsecond, edit the
$MFT and zorch the set of files being deleted, then come
back again. But that would violate all the principles of
"slow and steady wins the race". There are permissions to be
checked, a "safety cushion" by moving the files to a temporary
place (Trash can), all that fun stuff. It's an entire
ceremony. Even comes with dancing paper animation.
You wouldn't want to put that army of software
developers out of work now, would you ?


Maybe I've been using Linux too long. If I want to delete something the
operation executes immediately. The default GUI action is to the trash
can, so I'm covered in the case of an accident.

When it is time to empty the trash, again...the action is immediate.

"Delete" on XP worked fine.

Vista, prior to SP1 was absolutely beyond comprehension.

Vista SP1 and above improved things...but Microsoft can do better.


At least you've learned your lesson, to use Disk Cleanup
for Windows.old. Deleting it "head on", is a mistake.
A mistake I learned the hard way.

What you should be finding, is Disk Cleanup runs a lot
faster in Win10 Preview, than it does in Win8 or Win7. So
it would seem somebody noticed what a shambles the previous
implementation was.

For the other OSes, while Disk Cleanup is running, open
Task Manager. If you see processes "competing" with your
Disk Cleanup, like tiworker, you can pretend to open
Windows Update and check for updates. And that may be
sufficient to stop the tiworker run. I've seen a few things
wasting cycles while Disk Cleanup is running, which could
account for the extra-long runtime in some cases.

Paul


Since I'm testing Win10 in a virtual environment I know there is some
performance hit but for Disk Cleanup to have to have been run several
times for "Windows.old" to show up...did not seem right.

That said: I think Windows 10 is going to be generally liked.

philo wrote:
On 12/11/2014 04:06 AM, Paul wrote:



sniped for brevity

After running disk cleanup three times, it finally "saw" the previous
installation and gave the option to delete it.

That worked, but from the time I tried to delete "windows.old" until
the time I got rid of it...was perhaps a half an hour or so.


There is no reason this should have taken longer than one second.

It's the philosophy of the approach.

File system operations, they're done in small steps. If the
power goes off, there's no embarrassing mess that way. The
journal has a log of what was going on, for repair purposes.

To you or I, it seems a slam dunk, to just grab the FAT or
the $MFT, freeze system state for a microsecond, edit the
$MFT and zorch the set of files being deleted, then come
back again. But that would violate all the principles of
"slow and steady wins the race". There are permissions to be
checked, a "safety cushion" by moving the files to a temporary
place (Trash can), all that fun stuff. It's an entire
ceremony. Even comes with dancing paper animation.
You wouldn't want to put that army of software
developers out of work now, would you ?


Maybe I've been using Linux too long. If I want to delete something the
operation executes immediately. The default GUI action is to the trash
can, so I'm covered in the case of an accident.

When it is time to empty the trash, again...the action is immediate.

"Delete" on XP worked fine.

Vista, prior to SP1 was absolutely beyond comprehension.

Vista SP1 and above improved things...but Microsoft can do better.


At least you've learned your lesson, to use Disk Cleanup
for Windows.old. Deleting it "head on", is a mistake.
A mistake I learned the hard way.

What you should be finding, is Disk Cleanup runs a lot
faster in Win10 Preview, than it does in Win8 or Win7. So
it would seem somebody noticed what a shambles the previous
implementation was.

For the other OSes, while Disk Cleanup is running, open
Task Manager. If you see processes "competing" with your
Disk Cleanup, like tiworker, you can pretend to open
Windows Update and check for updates. And that may be
sufficient to stop the tiworker run. I've seen a few things
wasting cycles while Disk Cleanup is running, which could
account for the extra-long runtime in some cases.

Paul


Since I'm testing Win10 in a virtual environment I know there is some
performance hit but for Disk Cleanup to have to have been run several
times for "Windows.old" to show up...did not seem right.

That said: I think Windows 10 is going to be generally liked.


If you want immediate delete in Windows, the Trash Can can be
defeated with the Shift key. You can also right-click the Trash
Can and set the properties for immediate delete. That "cuts
the ceremony in half", so is not a complete solution. The time
taken will still be a good long while.

One thing I've noticed in Windows, is file system operations
are throttled or rate-limited. I use a RAM Disk (I'm using it
right now to edit some video, as scratch pad), and even with
the "blazing fast" RAM Disk (at 4GB/sec), it still will not
delete files faster than about 100 to 200 files per second.
I haven't received confirmation from SSD owners that the
rate continues to be that pathetic for them, but have no reason
to believe otherwise.

*******

Another option you can experiment with, is delete from the MSDOS
prompt. The properties are different there, but I don't know if you
get a recursive delete there or not (take out an entire tree).
I do mainly flat operations with "del", like maybe remove
one file with it, so don't have the experience trying to
"cut trees" with it. It would be interesting, to see whether it
is File Explorer with the delete throttle, or it's NTFS. My
money is on File Explorer/Desktop subsystem.

Paul

On 12/11/2014 07:37 AM, Paul wrote:
philo wrote:


snip

What you should be finding, is Disk Cleanup runs a lot
faster in Win10 Preview, than it does in Win8 or Win7. So
it would seem somebody noticed what a shambles the previous
implementation was.

For the other OSes, while Disk Cleanup is running, open
Task Manager. If you see processes "competing" with your
Disk Cleanup, like tiworker, you can pretend to open
Windows Update and check for updates. And that may be
sufficient to stop the tiworker run. I've seen a few things
wasting cycles while Disk Cleanup is running, which could
account for the extra-long runtime in some cases.

Paul


Since I'm testing Win10 in a virtual environment I know there is some
performance hit but for Disk Cleanup to have to have been run several
times for "Windows.old" to show up...did not seem right.

That said: I think Windows 10 is going to be generally liked.


If you want immediate delete in Windows, the Trash Can can be
defeated with the Shift key. You can also right-click the Trash
Can and set the properties for immediate delete. That "cuts
the ceremony in half", so is not a complete solution. The time
taken will still be a good long while.


Yep, I know that...but I rarely by pass the trash or recycle bin.
Though I don't recall making mistakes, it's a good precaution




One thing I've noticed in Windows, is file system operations
are throttled or rate-limited. I use a RAM Disk (I'm using it
right now to edit some video, as scratch pad), and even with
the "blazing fast" RAM Disk (at 4GB/sec), it still will not
delete files faster than about 100 to 200 files per second.
I haven't received confirmation from SSD owners that the
rate continues to be that pathetic for them, but have no reason
to believe otherwise.

*******

Another option you can experiment with, is delete from the MSDOS
prompt. The properties are different there, but I don't know if you
get a recursive delete there or not (take out an entire tree).
I do mainly flat operations with "del", like maybe remove
one file with it, so don't have the experience trying to
"cut trees" with it. It would be interesting, to see whether it
is File Explorer with the delete throttle, or it's NTFS. My
money is on File Explorer/Desktop subsystem.

Paul


Haven't tried the command line in Win10 to delete things
but I bet it's faster than the GUI method, I'll have to give it a try.

philo wrote:


Haven't tried the command line in Win10 to delete things
but I bet it's faster than the GUI method, I'll have to give it a try.

I did a quick test here, and deleted around 11000 JPG files
(each one a frame from a movie), and from the DOS prompt
it took nine seconds (del *.jpg). Which beats the GUI. But still
isn't a testimony to performance. Those were on my RAMDisk
and it takes about five minutes to regenerate them (extract
from movie, recompress).

Paul

On 12/11/2014 08:09 AM, Paul wrote:
philo wrote:


Haven't tried the command line in Win10 to delete things
but I bet it's faster than the GUI method, I'll have to give it a try.

I did a quick test here, and deleted around 11000 JPG files
(each one a frame from a movie), and from the DOS prompt
it took nine seconds (del *.jpg). Which beats the GUI. But still
isn't a testimony to performance. Those were on my RAMDisk
and it takes about five minutes to regenerate them (extract
from movie, recompress).

Paul


The "average user" is not going to be using the command line however.

If MS cannot figure out how to get "delete" working at least they should
close the dialog box and back-ground the operation so the user can get
on with their business.

On Thu, 11 Dec 2014 02:44:42 -0600, philo* wrote:

On 12/10/2014 02:08 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On 10 Dec 2014 08:46:39 GMT, "Jeff Gaines"
wrote:

On 09/12/2014 in message Char
Jackson wrote:

So how can we duplicate what you're seeing? How should we proceed toward a
solution?

Use Windows 7 (or Vista which had the same problems) and realise how slow
it is.

It's fine here, on each of my PCs that run it, so unless you can provide
some information on how to recreate the issue, I guess help will be hard to
come by. Good luck! Please let us know what you find.





I work on Win7 machines all the time and have never seen networking
problems.

Ditto to the first part of that statement. Regarding the second part, I've
*seen* networking issues with every version of Windows that I've worked on,
but certainly no more with 7 than with anything else. I think the OP needs
to dig deeper than to just say it's a Windows 7 issue.


The main complaint I have with all versions of Windows past XP are the
absurdly slow deletion times of large files.

And ditto to that, as well. XP was blazing fast in that area. I skipped over
Vista, but both 7 and 8 are pathetically slow.

I saw Paul's detailed response and while that provides somewhat of an
explanation, it's not quite a reason or justification. Deleting files used
to be something that Microsoft coders knew how to do efficiently. I'm not
sure why they've taken a different approach since XP.

On 12/11/2014 12:20 PM, Char Jackson wrote:


snip


I work on Win7 machines all the time and have never seen networking
problems.

Ditto to the first part of that statement. Regarding the second part, I've
*seen* networking issues with every version of Windows that I've worked on,
but certainly no more with 7 than with anything else. I think the OP needs
to dig deeper than to just say it's a Windows 7 issue.


The main complaint I have with all versions of Windows past XP are the
absurdly slow deletion times of large files.

And ditto to that, as well. XP was blazing fast in that area. I skipped over
Vista, but both 7 and 8 are pathetically slow.

I saw Paul's detailed response and while that provides somewhat of an
explanation, it's not quite a reason or justification. Deleting files used
to be something that Microsoft coders knew how to do efficiently. I'm not
sure why they've taken a different approach since XP.





Well, if MS has got to screw something up at least the "deletion"
problem is not the end of the world.


As a photographer who has a lot of images on my HD, I am happy the disk
caching with Windows is good and can get the thumbnails loaded rapidly.