I’ve noticed over that past few weeks of running Vista that certain things tend to be A LOT slower now, even given the fact that I recently picked up a gigabit network card for my server, and a gigabit switch, so I could make use of the built-in gigabit network adapter on my new workstation motherboard.

For instance, I use a program called VBLiner to line number all my VB source right before I compile it. The line numbering process itself is very fast, but the program would pause, noticeably, for each file it opened. It was almost as if the process of locating and opening the file was slow, but actually reading it was very fast.

Today, it finally got to be too much, so I had to start digging.

Come to find out, Vista has this nifty new thing called “Network Autotuning” that, apparently, doesn’t work particularly well.

You can see it yourself by opening a DOS box (with Admin priviledges), and entering

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SHOW GLOBAL

You should end up seeing something like this:

That “normal” is the problem.

Execute this to turn off autotuning:

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=disabled

turn it back on with

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=normal

and, apparently, using this will sometimes work, too, though I’m a bit hesitant to bother at this point.

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=HIGH

Nothing like a built-in network performance de-tuner.  It’s STRESS.EXE but without all the hassles of actually having to run a utility. Grrr.