The question is basically in the topic. I have the impression (no proof) that there are some strange hiccups and slowdowns, especially when working with network drives. Anyone else?
I cant say I have see issues. However both Spectre and Meltdown are issues caused by optomisations in the processor. The fixes for them will impact performance. How much, depends your usecase. I have read 10%-20% slower, and up to 2.5 times slower.
Yes, I've seen lower responsiveness in certain situations and some random stutters.
Posting system specs would probably make sense if you think the Spectre/Meltdown Windows/BIOS updates slowed things down, since the performance can be highly dependent on specs (or at least CPU maker, generation and BIOS version).
My understanding is that the patches shouldn't cause much difference for normal usage, but have gone wrong on some platforms (causing BSODs). You might want to look at other things before assuming a cause, though. e.g. Is CPU usage higher, or other performance metrics? Resource Monitor is built into Windows and good for seeing where bottlenecks are. Also, what else has been installed or updated recently?
Hi Leo,
let me be clear that I don't blame Dopus in any way. This is entirely Intels fault. I run an older Laptop with an Mobile QuadCore Intel Core i7-3630QM. It's still fast enough.
It's only that I see some weird "hiccups". Connections and re-connections to network drives are somewhat not as "snappy" as they were before. Also, it seems I see some general "slowdowns" on copying and moving and deleting files. I've seen reports that SSD performance is really bad with the patches. Maybe it's because of this.
There is no BIOS update yet, since Intel made bad Microcode patches.
I was just asking in the forum if anyone else sees strange effects since the Microsoft patches were released.
I'm not sure the Spectre/Meltdown patches do much on Intel systems which don't have the BIOS update yet, although the Windows code changes could introduce new bugs that might be causing problems even if the new mitigations are not enabled due to the old BIOS.
Windows 10 has a habit of overwriting good drivers with bad ones, sometimes old drivers with major problems, and sometimes drivers for literally the wrong hardware, when the system already had perfectly working ones installed. I would look in that direction as well, in case something like the network drivers have been affected. This happened to me, on two different machines, with Windows auto-detecting my motherboards' Intel gigabit ethernet controllers as different Intel gigabit ethernet versions and installing the wrong drivers for on both, causing various weird problems.
Network drivers, storage controller / chipset drivers and anti-virus are the things most likely to affect network drives and cause a sudden change in performance like you're seeing.
Of course, it could also be the new patches, but I would look in both directions and not assume it's the new patches just because they've been in the news. The performance hit in most cases is next to nothing*, and they shouldn't really do much without the corresponding updates on the BIOS side. But they had also caused BSOD on some types of systems, so it's not out of the question.
(* As I understand things, the "30%" figure that was in a lot of media reports is about a specific type of operation being slower, but the computer spends the majority of its time doing other things, so only a tiny fraction of what it does is slower, unless it's an unusual situation where it's doing the affected operation a lot more often. It has been shown to hit very fast NVMe/PCIe SSDs when doing lots of small, random reads, but even then the hit was not huge and was hard to notice in normal desktop situations.)
Process Monitor can be a good tool to log what is happening and find particular actions that are taking a long time. The Duration column in it is great for that, along with filters to remove all the operations that complete quickly.
Try this tool InSpectre.
It tells you what protection your machine has for Spectre and Meltdown, and if that protection is the kind that will impact performance. The performance impact depends on the age of your processor and version of windows.
It also allows you to disable/re-enable the protection. Keep in mind the Spectre attack is currently only theoretical, meltdown is proven and actively being proven in code.
This should allow you to understand what is happening with your pc.
Thanks @wowbagger very helpful.
Also, thanks @Leo for the detailed info. Only one more question: I found articles that certain software (especially in the industrial area) doesn't work correctly with the Windows patches installed. I was just wondering if Dopus needs to be re-compiled with certain settings (I'm not a programmer) like this packages?
Software like Opus would not need recompiling.