Thursday, April 5, 2007

Slow file copy/move in Vista ? Here is the solution !

One of the main complain I had about Vista is the slow file copy or move operations. It seems that it is the new "Remote Differential Compression" who is the culprit.

To turn it off go in Control Panel / Programs and features / Turn on or turn off Windows features and uncheck "Remote Differential Compression".

I found out that Vista TCP/IP "Receive Window Auto-Tuning " slows network access too.
To disable it, open a command prompt and type:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

and reboot .

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK - that does speed it up considerably! - Thanks. but - still not as fast as it would have been under XP... sigh

Anonymous said...

It doesn't solve file copy operation on my vista.

Anonymous said...

cheers, that's great - didn't have to apply any dodgy hot fix either, just turn off some of those new fantastic vista 'features'. really makes you wonder...
'calculating time' my eyeball.

I said...

For application developers:

Instead of changing global tcp settings, use SIO_SET_COMPATIBILITY_MODE option of WSAIoctl function.


Read more at:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms741621.aspx

Anonymous said...

Doesn't make any difference for me.

Anonymous said...

Thank's that did help out alot.

PS
For those who had slow tranfers with plug n play devices (usb). Try activating Removable storage managemet. By doing this my transfer speed went from 1MB>11MB.

Anonymous said...

The RDC feature is just a DLL installed for optional application use.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with file copy performance. It is not used by the file systems or copy utilities.

SP1 should address file copy performance.

Anonymous said...

it is still slow for me after installing SP1. Small files (~100Mb) are OK, around 10Mb/s. But large file(s) slow it down to about 1.5Mb/s.

Anonymous said...

You are the best!

Thank you.

Hamid Hoorshad said...

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Best wishes

Anonymous said...

I tried 100Mb half duplex, and it did take my speeds up to 8MB/s, but I found I can leave it at auto-negotiation and just set the Flow Control to Enabled for Transmission and Receive. This gives me 11MB/s average throughput and it still connects at gigabit speeds. I don't know why Flow Control is off by default. It might be specific to my driver, which is for a built-in NVidia LAN port.

BTW, my throughput prior to turning on Flow Control was about 500K/s if I was lucky.

Anonymous said...

Also, I tried changing the settings recommended in this blog, but it didn't work. I changed them back to their original settings. At least, I think I did. I set rss to "default" and autotuninglevel to "normal". So for me it was Flow Control.

DangerDad said...

Yes, that was it! Turning off "Remote Differential Compression" improved my disk-to-disk file copy by a factor of 4x.

Thanks a million!

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I guess I'm between a novice and intermediate in computers. I'm not working on a network. I'm just a home user. I was trying to copy a few gigabytes from my laptop to an external USB hard drive. The thing took 24 hours!

Copying in DOS is also maddeningly slow but gives the appearance of speed, because you can see the file names going up.

I don't know if previous suggestions will help with my problem, but how do you activate removable storage management?

How do you turn on flow control?

Thanks in advance.

McThePro said...

To enable Removable Storage Management in Vista, to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Turn Windows features on or off, and select Removable Storage Management.

Flow control does not apply to your problem, it is a network-related setting only.

Anonymous said...

McThePro

Well done thank you for this resolution I have been looking for this solution since Vista was first released but had given up. My disk to disk transfer went up from 4-5MBs to 50-60MBs. Just turned off RDC rebooted and voila problem solved. Definitely going try the auto-tuning tweak next.

Anonymous said...

For more details on why disabling RDC is incorrect and pointless to this performance discussion, review:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/06/26/debunking-the-vista-remote-differential-compression-myth.aspx

Ko0Ls{RD} said...

Thank you very much. Worked like MAGIC!!!!
solved the problem in Win 7.
Tranfer Would start at131mbps n then would stop for few seconds in between, and it would resume again.Thanks a lot!!!!

Anonymous said...

Move off a Dell D600 (wired 10/100) to a Toshiba with Vista (wireless G & broken built-in 10/100 NIC.)
Disabled broken NIC & started using a USB NIC (10mb by dLink)
Wanted to be able to easily wander about the house and dock whenever I was parked in my easy chair.

Could not BELIEVE how slow it was to move a DVD file on newer box. What took 3 minutes on the Dell was taking 3 hours on Vista.

Used steps and believe I'm best off just using the wireless...which seems much better...thanks!

Service packs prior to steps did not help issue.
Trying to bridge resulted in a BSOD.

After these steps the wireless improved so much I ditched the USB wired connection.

Anonymous said...

That works! Thankyou!