The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[Overly Serious]

I take it this would mean that the problem is to do with Windows Copy itself and not NTFS then? I have heard one theory being that WC is single threaded causing the slow performance but I don't know, what do you think?

Not sure. It does have some settings you can tweak. Let me try changing them around and also seeing if I can spot a different number of cores or threads used between FastCopy on a couple of different settings and also against raw Windows copy in Resource Monitor.

A few minutes later...

So File Explorer is not single-threaded in its file copy. It varied between 4 and 8 CPU cores (logical) whilst copying a project folder.
FastCopy sat consistently on 4 cores during its run.

FastCopy does have some things disabled by default, like "Verify". I enabled that to see what difference it made just as an example. Increased the time from 16 seconds to 22.

Their website does say its speed is "because it uses multi-threads for Read/Write/Verify, Overlapped I/O, Direct I/O", so my rudimentary quick test isn't showing whatever magic they're doing to achieve this.

 

[The Ugly One]

Not sure. It does have some settings you can tweak. Let me try changing them around and also seeing if I can spot a different number of cores or threads used between FastCopy on a couple of different settings and also against raw Windows copy in Resource Monitor.

A few minutes later...

So File Explorer is not single-threaded in its file copy. It varied between 4 and 8 CPU cores (logical) whilst copying a project folder.
FastCopy sat consistently on 4 cores during its run.

FastCopy does have some things disabled by default, like "Verify". I enabled that to see what difference it made just as an example. Increased the time from 16 seconds to 22.

Their website does say its speed is "because it uses multi-threads for Read/Write/Verify, Overlapped I/O, Direct I/O", so my rudimentary quick test isn't showing whatever magic they're doing to achieve this.

Sounds like they just did a much better job than Microsoft of finding tasks that can be executed asynchronously.

 

[Leaded Gasoline]

Don't these fast copying programs predate multi-core CPUs? I think Microsoft just didn't bother optimizing their code too much

 

[Demonslayer1776]

There are a whole bunch of companies right now who are trying to force enterprise customers onto cloud services because it will increase their revenue. Nevermind that the cloud service is less stable, more outage-prone, and has major bandwidth & latency bottlenecks. You vill eat ze bugs!

I'm actually pretty favorable to cloud for business usecases. Most businesses aren't willing to pay the money it takes to have someone build out their infrastructure correctly. Smaller businesses will try to have their helpdesk guy manage their servers and royally fuck things up. Larger businesses see benefits because they dont have to rent out space in a bunch of data centers and maintain it. It's not the right fit for everything but I've warmed up to it over time.

 

[anustart76]

I'm actually pretty favorable to cloud for business usecases. Most businesses aren't willing to pay the money it takes to have someone build out their infrastructure correctly. Smaller businesses will try to have their helpdesk guy manage their servers and royally fuck things up. Larger businesses see benefits because they dont have to rent out space in a bunch of data centers and maintain it. It's not the right fit for everything but I've warmed up to it over time.

The real benefit to it for businesses is they get an external party to blame when things blow up.

 

[The Ugly One]

I'm actually pretty favorable to cloud for business usecases. Most businesses aren't willing to pay the money it takes to have someone build out their infrastructure correctly. Smaller businesses will try to have their helpdesk guy manage their servers and royally fuck things up. Larger businesses see benefits because they dont have to rent out space in a bunch of data centers and maintain it. It's not the right fit for everything but I've warmed up to it over time.

Big trend right now is repatriation of cloud. For most things, it's just not worth it.

 

[DavidS877]

Big trend right now is repatriation of cloud. For most things, it's just not worth it.

Especially for companies that own their own datacenters. Good for occasional bursts. Bad for base load.

 

[macrodegenerate]

Especially for companies that own their own datacenters. Good for occasional bursts. Bad for base load.

It's the ingress pricing, these companies were sold the idea that with REST and SPAs they could massively reduce the amount of outgoing bandwidth. They found out all too late after they were bribed by GCP and AWS to switch that, that wasn't the case. Then they got raped on bandwidth which is the main cost of GCP and AWS instead of compute. We saw this with fishtank and the cost of bandwidth of running several streams.

Every five years HP and DELL shits out a new series of rack servers. Companies then liquidate their current supply and buy new ones. There really isn't a reason to do this from a financial or performance standpoint though. We just aren't seeing the performance gains. Plus most businesses run CRUD apps where performance is impacted most by IO.

Plus uptime isn't an issue as long as you set up your facility correctly initially with safe guards and redundencies. I worked at a department in a multinational company that ran 40+ 10 year old servers. Even when pressured the head of that department refused to go off prem, opting to keep an IT group on site. The head made it abundantly clear, that all we had to do was get shit back up in 30 minutes, and that you could watch Star Wars all day as long as we could do that. We didn't have a single person job hopping in 2021-2022, and our only major outage was 20 minutes when the city lost power, and 10 of those were waiting for the generators to come online. That's better than a 99% SLA. We were so fucking good. A intern even shut down a hypervisor once on accident, and with our setup we didn't have a minute of downtime. All we did was haze him for a week.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Every five years HP and DELL shits out a new series of rack servers. Companies then liquidate their current supply and buy new ones. There really isn't a reason to do this from a financial or performance standpoint though.

I suspect it's got something to do with planned obsolescence being built into the support contracts, parts pricing, or both.
That $100 stick of RAM in your server? Well that's an Official Dell (TM) part and for you it costs $200. But if you're in "extended support", it's a legacy part and they might be able to scrounge up limited quantities for $800 apiece.
Meanwhile there are still stacks of them down at Best Buy for $100, but if you use those, your expensive corporate support hotline will just tell you "We don't support untested hardware configurations".

I'm guessing by the time you start seeing an appreciable number of hardware failures, they've already made it far more expensive to fix it than to just dump the lot into the e-waste stream.

 

[Betonhaus]

I suspect it's got something to do with planned obsolescence being built into the support contracts, parts pricing, or both.
That $100 stick of RAM in your server? Well that's an Official Dell (TM) part and for you it costs $200. But if you're in "extended support", it's a legacy part and they might be able to scrounge up limited quantities for $800 apiece.
Meanwhile there are still stacks of them down at Best Buy for $100, but if you use those, your expensive corporate support hotline will just tell you "We don't support untested hardware configurations".

I'm guessing by the time you start seeing an appreciable number of hardware failures, they've already made it far more expensive to fix it than to just dump the lot into the e-waste stream.

Does mean that you can get used hardware for cheap of you get the timing right.

For example a couple years ago I got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with an i5-6300u for $150ish as they were selling them by the pallet on eBay. Now that same model is going for like $300 on eBay, but I was able to get the 5th gen X1 Yoga with a 10th gen i5 for $150ish. I was able to buy a ThinkServer TS440 for $20

 

[macrodegenerate]

I suspect it's got something to do with planned obsolescence being built into the support contracts, parts pricing, or both.
That $100 stick of RAM in your server? Well that's an Official Dell (TM) part and for you it costs $200. But if you're in "extended support", it's a legacy part and they might be able to scrounge up limited quantities for $800 apiece.
Meanwhile there are still stacks of them down at Best Buy for $100, but if you use those, your expensive corporate support hotline will just tell you "We don't support untested hardware configurations".

I'm guessing by the time you start seeing an appreciable number of hardware failures, they've already made it far more expensive to fix it than to just dump the lot into the e-waste stream.

Strangely enough Dell machines were always more compatible with 3rd party hardware than prolients. Not to mention the raid controllers were replaceable as a separate part. Really picking up a bunch of used servers and running them redundantly is the way. Either that or whiteboxing your own like Null did for the farms. Still amazed an ASRock motherboard broke down, those things are absolute beasts that last over 10 years even on consumer boards.

Does mean that you can get used hardware for cheap of you get the timing right.

For example a couple years ago I got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with an i5-6300u for $150ish as they were selling them by the pallet on eBay. Now that same model is going for like $300 on eBay, but I was able to get the 5th gen X1 Yoga with a 10th gen i5 for $150ish. I was able to buy a ThinkServer TS440 for $20

Just picked up a P70 for $400, absolute monster of a machine with a 17" display, a Quadro and an i7. When it was new it was probably a couple grand. Used enterprise workstations and laptops are where it's at. Bought a T520 for a family member and the thing is still chugging around as their daily driver 10 years later.

 

[Betonhaus]

Just picked up a P70 for $400, absolute monster of a machine with a 17" display, a Quadro and an i7. When it was new it was probably a couple grand. Used enterprise workstations and laptops are where it's at. Bought a T520 for a family member and the thing is still chugging around as their daily driver 10 years later

Most companies have like a five year replacement cycle right? So you just need to look for the best of the best from about five years ago and it'll be cheaper then older and newer stuff

 

[analrapist]

Plus uptime isn't an issue as long as you set up your facility correctly initially with safe guards and redundencies.

I experience so little sanity in the business world these days that a tale like yours is truly heartening. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Betonhaus]

What's people's impressions of Windows 11 LTSC? will it be manageable when 10 LTSC is discontinued?

 

[The Ugly One]

It's the ingress pricing, these companies were sold the idea that with REST and SPAs they could massively reduce the amount of outgoing bandwidth. They found out all too late after they were bribed by GCP and AWS to switch that, that wasn't the case. Then they got raped on bandwidth which is the main cost of GCP and AWS instead of compute. We saw this with fishtank and the cost of bandwidth of running several streams.

The other thing is that 'outsource your IT' just didn't happen. A lot of IT work, like supporting the software stack and servicing laptops, stays in-house.

Don't these fast copying programs predate multi-core CPUs? I think Microsoft just didn't bother optimizing their code too much

Typically if you see two codes doing the same thing, but one is 100x faster than the other, when you dig in, you will find:

• Linear search
• Bubble sort
• Linked lists

Replace those things with

• binary search
• qsort
• arrays

and you will look like a wizard. I know a guy who is a VP now solely because he replaced linked lists with arrays in legacy code and earned a reputation as a "technological wizard," like his bosses legit think he's a modern-day Isaac Newton.

 

[Joe Swanson]

What's people's impressions of Windows 11 LTSC? will it be manageable when 10 LTSC is discontinued?

My company has a corporate license for the iot ltsc due to selling point of sales machines to various different clients.

I've messed around with it and it's perfectly usable, but by the time 10 iot ltsc loses support in 2032 you'd be better off having learned Linux in the meantime

 

[Betonhaus]

My company has a corporate license for the iot ltsc due to selling point of sales machines to various different clients.

I've messed around with it and it's perfectly usable, but by the time 10 iot ltsc loses support in 2032 you'd be better off having learned Linux in the meantime

I'm pretty much only using it for a virtual machine, a htpc that can play all windows games without headache, and a htph connected to a touchscreen with proprietary drivers that don't support Linux.

Speaking of which, what is the best key remapper that can remap keys such as Brower home or launch media or mail apps? I have a usb remote I use for them that I'd like to remap a key to full screen or whatever.

 

[Joe Swanson]

I'm pretty much only using it for a virtual machine, a htpc that can play all windows games without headache, and a htph connected to a touchscreen with proprietary drivers that don't support Linux.

Speaking of which, what is the best key remapper that can remap keys such as Brower home or launch media or mail apps? I have a usb remote I use for them that I'd like to remap a key to full screen or whatever.

Completely understandable, should be completely fine for your usecase then, just make sure to disable the little telemetry Microsoft left in

 

[jeff7989]

I'm pretty much only using it for a virtual machine, a htpc that can play all windows games without headache, and a htph connected to a touchscreen with proprietary drivers that don't support Linux.

Speaking of which, what is the best key remapper that can remap keys such as Brower home or launch media or mail apps? I have a usb remote I use for them that I'd like to remap a key to full screen or whatever.

Have you tried PowerToys?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/keyboard-manager

 

[Betonhaus]

Have you tried PowerToys?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/keyboard-manager

It is what I used last time, but I found that the launch at startup kept breaking during its frequent updates