Mark Russinovich Explains Vista Multimedia Playback and Network Throughput


      A few weeks ago a poster with the handle dloneranger reported in the 2CPU forums that he experienced reduced network throughput on his Vista system when he played audio or video. Other posters chimed in with similar results, and in the last week attention has been drawn to the behavior by other sites, including Slashdot and Zdnet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.
      Many people have correctly surmised that the degradation in network performance during multimedia playback is directly connected with mechanisms employed by the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS), a feature new to Windows Vista that I covered in my three-part TechNet Magazine article series on Windows Vista kernel changes. Multimedia playback requires a constant rate of media streaming, and playback will glitch or sputter if its requirements aren?t met. The MMCSS service runs in the generic service hosting process Svchost.exe, where it automatically prioritizes the playback of video and audio in order to prevent other tasks from interfering with the CPU usage of the playback software:
      
            
      
      When a multimedia application begins playback, the multimedia APIs it uses call the MMCSS service to boost the priority of the playback thread into the realtime range, which covers priorities 16-31, for up to 8ms of every 10ms interval of the time, depending on how much CPU the playback thread requires. Because other threads run at priorities in the dynamic priority range below 15, even very CPU intensive applications won?t interfere with the playback.
      You can see the boost by playing an audio or video clip in Windows Media Player (WMP), running the Reliability and Performance Monitor (Start->Run->Perfmon), selecting the Performance Monitor item, and adding the Priority Current value for all the Wmplayer threads in the Thread object. Set the graph scale to 31 (the highest priority value on Windows) and you?ll easily spot the boosted thread, shown here running at priority 21:Continue At Source


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