Vista’s ‘virgin stack’ to speed up your torrents

Written by Smaran on October 03, 2006 

Windows Vista has a brand new Network Stack. According to tests conducted on both Windows XP and Vista, the new stack might actually speed up BitTorrent transfers by an estimated 10%.
We’ve been hearing a lot about how Windows Vista has a brand new ‘Network Stack‘. As I understand it, a Network or Protocol Stack is [...]

Windows Vista has a brand new Network Stack. According to tests conducted on both Windows XP and Vista, the new stack might actually speed up BitTorrent transfers by an estimated 10%.

Windows VistaWe’ve been hearing a lot about how Windows Vista has a brand new ‘Network Stack‘. As I understand it, a Network or Protocol Stack is basically a set of gates that data must pass through when travelling to your computer from a location in the outside world (normally the Internet or LAN). The Network Stack is the part of the operating system that has direct access to your computer’s hardware. Programs running in the OS make use of it to send and receive data to and from the outside world. Your BitTorrent client is one of those programs.

The Network Stack present in Windows XP and Server 2003 was originally developed in the early 90s and “modified and enhanced over time.” Microsoft claimed in 2005 that Vista’s brand new Stack would deliver higher throughput and increase network performance for most users around the world.

Long Zheng of istartedsomething conducted some tests to find out if Microsoft’s claim would hold true.

He writes, “I performed 4 tests to prove/disprove their claim. I used a tool called iperf, which measures the maximum TCP bandwidth. I ran this tool 10 times for each operating system, half on a wired 100Mbit ethernet connection, and half on a 54Mbit Wifi 802.11g connection.” He goes on to say, “the results are clear, Windows Vista definitely improves TCP/IP network thoroughput.”

According to his estimates, BitTorrent transfers in Windows Vista are up to 10% faster than in Windows XP. And it’s not just torrents, but every other network/Internet activity will benefit from the new Stack as well, including http transfers, online games etc.

This would normally be considered good news, but a new Network Stack is almost certainly an unsecured one. Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte talked about ‘Vista’s Virgin Stack‘ on a recent episode of Security Now, the popular pod/netcast. Apparently, flaws that were fixed in the last decade in Windows 95 have arisen once again. We can only imagine how vulnerable computers running Vista may be, and wait for crackers (hackers with evil intentions) to do their thing and see what happens.

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110 Responses

1 Oct 03, 2006 at 22:47 by Floodland

Bull sh*t. Vista hardly can improve Bittorrent downloads at all, since the bottleneck isn’t the network stack but the internet connection (which does NOT depends on the OS stack). Unless, of course, Microsoft upgrades your intenet connection (or ISP routers) with the license. For the price they’re pretending to sell the OS could be, who knows.
This kind of propaganda shouldn’t be published!

2 Oct 03, 2006 at 22:55 by Tux The Pengiun

Bittorrent download is unpredictable and difficult to measure since it is so dynamic in the sense that download speed largely depends on the number of seeders and leechers, which change constantly.

Heck, I’d prefer a balance between speed and security. I will not have the fastest network stack but can be compromised by everybody!

3 Oct 03, 2006 at 23:56 by Bryan

Floodland you obviously dont know much about the inner workings of a networking subsystem. Many software settings can dramatically increase or decrease the throughput of any type of connection, whether it be a dialup modem, wireless lan, 10BaseT or 100BaseT. Just do a search for windows xp mtu and you will see tons of information on how this one setting can change your throughput.

4 Oct 03, 2006 at 23:56 by MGSsancho

maybe he set up a bt server in his home. and had 10 other computers as leechers, then maybe 1 or 2 as seeders. then he could have just tested snding out a 4gb movie for a linux dictro across his LAN. that how i would test it. I if ou have a cheap switch, as long as all other devices remain the same, testing BT on a lan is a good way to get predictible results on BT. but the article does not specify what file it was, or the seed/leech ratio used.

5 Oct 04, 2006 at 00:01 by Steve

Floodland the network stack can definately make a differnce for Bittorrent, perhaps not with throughput so much as with establishing connections. There may have been improvements in Vista’s stack which improve throughput when there are a lot of simotaneous connections being established by client software.

6 Oct 04, 2006 at 00:04 by p.vande

Eh, I’ll do the unpopular thing; I’ll stand up and defend it.

Yes, Bittorrent is a somewhat … unreliable medium when it comes to the amount of data that is “at your door” at any given time. That does make “improvements” a difficult thing to measure. So, for the sake of argument (and the scientific method), we will abstract away all those variables by saying that everything’s running “full throttle”.

If everything is running wide open, that gives us a total of three possible bottlenecks: our internet connection itself (modems and routers included), our local network, or the network stack in the machine. Now, if the networking stack is a limiting factor (and, given that Microsoft saw room for improvement, it’s possible), any improvements that can be made there do increase overall throughput. Since TCP packets are fairly fixed in size, the primary place for tweaking would be with regard to packet handling. Long story short, the less time you spend looking at each packet, the better; and, as a side note, that can turn into to fewer rejected packets and less time spent waiting for packets to be resent (a second win).

As we back away from the strictly scientific view, however, the likelihood of the TCP stack becoming the limiting factor at some point approaches 100%. Given that, any improvements made will affect your overall transfer times – the big question that remains to be answered is by how large a factor.

7 Oct 04, 2006 at 00:06 by p.vande

Or perhaps the thing I was doing was not so unpopular…

Well, it’s not everyday I’m so early to a party. :)

8 Oct 04, 2006 at 02:54 by Mario Sanchez

Many don’t know but, Microsoft has developed a high performance pipeline mechanism to speed transfer downloads, at least to a 8% more than the traditional berkeley sockets mechanism. This scheme of Microsoft puts a polling, or selecting mechanism with a Proactor Pattern using multithreading to put your CPU to do just downloads 80% more than today. Many Linux developers don’t know nothing about the reactor pattern in Bit Torrent, or not even they know how to implement it in C, but I tell you that Microsoft’s engineers have improved this, so you will see a difference in Windows Vista compared to Bit Torrent Clients written in Linux.

9 Oct 04, 2006 at 04:19 by Floodland

[quote comment="13840"]Floodland you obviously dont know much about the inner workings of a networking subsystem. Many software settings can dramatically increase or decrease the throughput of any type of connection, whether it be a dialup modem, wireless lan, 10BaseT or 100BaseT. Just do a search for windows xp mtu and you will see tons of information on how this one setting can change your throughput.[/quote]

I DO know more than you think about the TCP, but what I questioned is that Microsoft MAY improve the network stack, but, the impact over bittorrent streaming can’t show much (if any) improvement just because the bottleneck is NOT there. It may improve SMB performance, pretty big HTTP/FTP servers, it may improve general network access, from 10BaseT to Gigabit connections, and that’s good! But again, the impact over P2P protocols that work over 6Mb/s (?) lines should be *insignificant*. The throughput is bellow 10% of the network capacity there!
Now I think, it MAY affect you if you didn’t patch the absurd/funny half open connections limit imposed by XP SP2. Hahaha, big win there M$! Many TCP settings affect troughput for special connections/conditions, depending on what kind of service/router is used, or if you intentionally broke them (as M$ did with XP SP2). Or if you open 5000 simutaneous connections over your 56kb/s modem too…

10 Oct 04, 2006 at 07:28 by Eli

The TCP performance enhancements are most noticeable over high-latency connections and during packet loss.

11 Oct 06, 2006 at 14:16 by knäckebröd

So this increase in torrent throughput, is that compared to an old style (or new one but custompatched) tcpip.sys in WinXP or against the one crippled to 10 concurrent connections, resulting in EventId 4226 ?

12 Oct 10, 2006 at 06:01 by brad

Vista is terrible. I tested it on my laptop for a few months, and the performance got worse and worse to the point that I just formatted and put XP back on it. I didn’t notice torrents any faster either.. as a matter of fact, nothing was faster. Shiny maybe, but whopty freaking do.

13 Oct 12, 2006 at 21:28 by td

Now we need a Tcp/ip half-open patcher for Vista. Is the limit even in vista, cos torrents are at 50kb/s!

14 Oct 17, 2006 at 11:15 by sohbet

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15 Oct 17, 2006 at 16:30 by bardicknowledge

I have tested this rumor! I have blogged about my findings at my blog
http://paperkingdoms.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/vista-rumor-of-increased-torrent-speeds/

If you don’t feel like reading it, basically yes Vista does increase speeds but the speeds aren’t stable, bringing the overall speed down to the same or a lower average than XP

16 Dec 27, 2006 at 00:35 by POC

instrad of a re-boot of the PC you can stop & Restart the Network connections in system to clear the IP stack, or create a cmd file the MUST be run as Adminstrator on Vista
Copy and paste the following into a text file and save as xxx.cmd

net STOP Netman
net START Netman
Echo “Netman service stopped & Restarted”
Exit

17 Feb 18, 2007 at 13:31 by Killer

This article is total bullshit. Dont read this. There is no speed difference at all. not even a 0.1% improvement! i have tried Vistas 3 versions, and no changes in speeds. they remain exactly same.

18 Mar 03, 2007 at 19:58 by Mad

I spend every day with download from torrent sites.Windows Xp was a god one at his time.All can i say Vista is working very well,and about speed, yes is true, is more faster than win Xp.

19 Apr 02, 2007 at 04:49 by baller

you are retards if you say it does not improve speed I have had vista for 2 months now and everything has dramatically increased in download speed. To say it is bullshit without knowing first hand is just ignorant I dont like vista but I will stand up for this aspect and say that this is most definitley a pro.

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nice text. Thanks!!![quote comment="57951"]I spend every day with download from torrent sites.Windows Xp was a god one at his time.All can i say Vista is working very well,and about speed, yes is true, is more faster than win Xp.[/quote]

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instrad of a re-boot of the PC you can stop & Restart the Network connections in system to clear the IP stack, or create a cmd file the MUST be run as Adminstrator on Vista
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Yes, Bittorrent is a somewhat … unreliable medium when it comes to the amount of data that is "at your door" at any given time. That does make "improvements" a difficult thing to measure. So, for the sake of argument (and the scientific method), we will abstract away all those variables by saying that everything's running "full throttle".
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