14 DAY TRIAL // Attempting to avoid the rather sluggish experience that has become inherently associated with Windows Vista RTM, Microsoft promised, through the voice of Steven Sinofsky, that Windows 7 would not set a single “bit” out of Redmond until it would meet a set of performance criteria. The Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, is determined to have the next iteration of the Windows client rise up to the new performance standards as early as the first Beta, but especially with the gold version.
“Performance, as absolute and measurable as it might seem, also has a lot of subtlety. There are many elements and many tradeoffs involved in achieving performance that meets everyone’s expectations. We know that even meeting expectations, folks will want even more out of their Windows PCs (and that’s expected). We’ve re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area in Windows 7 (and IE 8). This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams (Fundamentals),” Sinofsky stated.
The very subtlety of performance depends on a variety of factors, as Sinofsky indicated. And in this context, making Windows 7 fly will require optimizations across the operating system, with emphasis placed on memory, CPU, disk I/O, boot, shutdown, standby/resume, base system and disk footprint.
“How much memory a given scenario allocates during a run. As you know, there is a classic tradeoff in time v. space in computer science and we’re not exempt. We see this tradeoff quite a bit in caches where you can use more memory (or disk space) in order to improve performance or to avoid re-computing something,” Sinofsky said.
Vista was by all counts a RAM hog. The current version of Windows can swallow every last piece of RAM, and still appear hungry for more. At the same time, Microsoft failed to make Vista faster than Windows XP on similar system configurations. In this respect, processor utilization is also an item worth considering. As hardware evolves and CPUs with multiple cores become the standard, there will simply be an increasing amount of horsepower for Windows 7 to use. However, Microsoft is tweaking the operating system in order to reduce utilization and power consumption as much as possible.
“Disk I/O - while hard drives have improved substantially in performance we still must do everything we can do minimize the amount that Windows itself does in terms of reading and writing to disk (including paging of course). This is an area receiving special attention for Windows 7 with the advent of solid state storage devices that have dramatically different “characteristics”,” Sinofsky added.
At the same time, Windows 7 will sport faster boot, shutdown, and standby/resume times. The Redmond company is focusing greatly on making Vista's successor as fast as possible in these areas, where Windows has traditionally suffered greatly.
The Windows 7 base system is also analyzed and in the process of being optimized. In this context, the Redmond company is working to tune up the amount of resources used by the base system, before any of the third-party software is loaded. However, Sinofsky stated that componentizing the base system into on-demand pieces might be a move that would eventually end up hurting performance rather than helping it.
“Disk footprint – while not directly related to runtime performance, many folks see the footprint of the OS as indicative of the perceived performance. We have some specific goals around this metric and will dive into the details soon as well. We’ll also take some time to explain WindowsWinSxS as it is often the subject of much discussion on technet and msdn! Here rather than runtime tradeoffs we see convenience tradeoffs for things like on disk device drivers, assistance content, optional Windows components, as well as diagnostics and logging information,” Sinofsky explained.