Some Notes on the Machines

Something relatively new. Very interesting changes from some Microsoft documentation, searchable here. Performance improvements have been visible in general behavior of all machines tested for this so far. On some, reported CPU speed does still change over time. BIOS changes are likely to assist as well.

The lines below work in administrative Powershell. It creates a new power scheme called “Maximum Performance”, based on the hidden built-in “Ultimate Performance” if it exists on your system. To revert, just go into Power in the Control Panel and reselect your original power scheme.

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

$oldpower = powercfg -getactivescheme
"Creating power scheme:  Maximum Performance"

$newpower = powercfg -duplicatescheme scheme_current
$newpower = ($newpower[19..54] -join "")
powercfg -changename $newpower "Maximum Performance"
powercfg -setactive $newpower

# Makes maximum CPU speeds available, by default they're not
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE 2
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE1 2
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTHRESHOLD 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTHRESHOLD1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTIME 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTIME1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDECTHRESHOLD 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDECTHRESHOLD1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTPERF 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTPERF1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFAUTONOMOUS 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDUTYCYCLING 0

# Sets overall throttles to maximum
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMAX 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMAX1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMIN 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMIN1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor HETEROCLASS1INITIALPERF 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor HETEROCLASS0FLOORPERF 100

# Turns off CPU core controls, tells OS to just use them all.
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPMAXCORES 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPMINCORES 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor DISTRIBUTEUTIL 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPDISTRIBUTION 0

# Minimizes CPU spinup time, and maximizes spindown time, just in case
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPINCREASETIME 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPDECREASETIME 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPHEADROOM 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPCONCURRENCY 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTUNPARK 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTUNPARK1 0

# Sets energy savings preference to zero
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFEPP 0

# Commits all above changes to current power plan
powercfg -setactive scheme_current

Some detail can be had here and here.

These changes are disrecommended for cooling-poor laptops. And one might want to watch the temperatures of poorly built desktops and even some poorly built servers, too.

A version of the above which alters the original power scheme, and runs in administrative CMD, is below. The below is not very easily reversible. It does not use the “Ultimate Performance” builtin.

REM Makes maximum CPU speeds available, by default they're not
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE 2
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE1 2
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTHRESHOLD 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTHRESHOLD1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTIME 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFINCTIME1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDECTHRESHOLD 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDECTHRESHOLD1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTPERF 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTPERF1 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFAUTONOMOUS 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFDUTYCYCLING 0

REM Sets overall throttles to maximum
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMAX 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMAX1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMIN 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PROCTHROTTLEMIN1 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor HETEROCLASS1INITIALPERF 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor HETEROCLASS0FLOORPERF 100

REM Turns off CPU core controls, tells OS to just use them all.
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPMAXCORES 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPMINCORES 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor DISTRIBUTEUTIL 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPDISTRIBUTION 0

REM Minimizes CPU spinup time, and maximizes spindown time, just in case
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPINCREASETIME 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPDECREASETIME 100
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPHEADROOM 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor CPCONCURRENCY 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTUNPARK 0
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor LATENCYHINTUNPARK1 0

REM Sets energy savings preference to zero
powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFEPP 0

REM Commits all above changes to current power plan
powercfg -setactive scheme_current

There is a built-in, hidden, “Ultimate Performance” power scheme in Windows 10, 11, and probably others:

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

Does not include everything in a page on this site, but integration will follow soon :-)

Recently a number of things have come to light together, the combination of which is remarkable.

1. The System Volume Information folder, on very many slow Windows machines, has a lot of junk files within, files that serve no purpose. These are called “orphan shadows”.
2. Orphan shadows occur when the RAID or other drive capability of a Windows machine, cannot keep up with demands on the Volume Shadow Services (VSS) subsystem of Windows, and/or has to abandon an effort in midstream. VSS is used by a huge variety of Windows and application operations.
3. The best-understood examples of events causing orphan shadows, are hard poweroffs in the middle of many different operations large and small.
4. Other examples are simultaneous heavy demands which are too high for the RAID or drive capability. For instance, if demands on RAID are already fairly high, a large database request happening at the same moment as the incremental for a backup will cause one or both to fail, and will create orphan shadow(s) for one or both.
5. As orphan shadows build up, they take more and more space in System Volume Information, and when SVI has more than 20 gigabytes or so of these things, all VSS operations get slower and slower, presumably because the VSS system has to choose to bypass all of the orphans over and over again.
6. SVI has been seen to rise to hundreds of gigabytes, sometimes taking hours to clear.

The short-term step, to get things working, is to clear SVI. On a client OS, this is done thus:

vssadmin delete shadows /all

On a server OS, we do the above, and then we also run diskshadow, and within that little environment, we do:

delete shadows all

One situation has been seen thus far, where the above two do not do the job, where SVI remains huge. No standard solution has been identified for this as of yet. Up until now, the symptoms have been clear and obvious, but causality a lot more mysterious, and we have often alleviated the situation via removal of OEMware, BIOS, firmware, and driver updates, and use of tweaking tools. On a server, one can remove Windows Defender:

Uninstall-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender

and this helps a lot (solved one big problem so far) on server, but not on a client OS, Microsoft doesn’t allow it. Also, methods to disable bits of Windows Defender on client OS have been disallowed increasingly, as build upgrades have been given.

One step which has helped is to CHKDSK /F the volumes and reboot, and then try the standard cleanout steps again.

Just today, some VSS tweaks have manifest:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/backup/registry-keys-for-backup-and-restore?redirectedfrom=MSDN#maxshadowcopies

specifically this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\Settings
DWORD MaxShadowCopies

and this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VolSnap
DWORD MinDiffAreaFileSize

but it will be a while of testing before any confidence is available as to how to use these to help. Thus far, MaxShadowCopies of 8 and MinDiffAreaFileSize of 3200 seems to be helping, except when it doesn’t, and in the minority I have been using 4/1600.

Not something always to do — I’m kind of allergic to removing standard components — but certainly if you have anemic RAID or a slow hard drive, this will help, even before the necessary reboot:

Uninstall-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender

Servers only, alas, and this may go away in later server builds.

Run it like this from administrative CMD:

cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:65535 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:65535

Gives you a lot more! Procedurally it’s a bit different too.

Appears to work in Vista, 7, and 8. A whole lot of web references are out there on this. Just one example:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-vista-tips/manage-irq-settings-windows-vista-7/

One studies a list of IRQs and related hardware, and then choose the hardware to maximize priority upon using registry adds. Use msinfo32 (Hardware Resources, IRQs).

We then add registry entries here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl

It is reported best to include IRQ zero (0) and eight (8) to start with, this is system timer and real time clock. To do these two, add the following-named items as DWORD in the above area, value 1 for the first, value 2 for the second:

IRQ0Priority
IRQ8Priority

When originally looking at this, I was solving a tendency for my softphone to cut out during any load situation or drive access, and so I checked my PC using Device Manager and msinfo32 as above, and also added subseqeuent priorities:

IRQ7Priority
IRQ20Priority
IRQ21Priority
IRQ4294967288Priority

because on this box, 7, 20, and 21 were USB, and 4294967288 was the active NIC. After you have made the changes, reboot.

The above also produced much better response to VNC and RDP redirection via Labtech.

At least one resource states that one must not set the same priority to multiple IRQs. Duplication may be the source of some reports saying it is placebo effect. Here is a very interesting post with some seriously good-quality testing and results:

https://www.tenforums.com/performance-maintenance/140553-regedit-priority-control-irq.html#6

Spotted these recently. All of these are to be run in administrative Powershell. On one Server 2019 machine, these boosted overall throughput from 7-25M to 600-700M.

File server ( Microsoft docs here )

Set-SmbServerConfiguration -EnableMultiChannel $true -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -EnableOplocks $true -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -ServerHidden $true -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -IrpStackSize 20 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxMpxCount 4096 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxWorkItems 16384 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxSessionPerConnection 16384 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -TreatHostAsStableStorage $true -force

Clients ( Microsoft docs here )

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableBandwidthThrottling $false -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableLargeMtu $true -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableLoadBalanceScaleOut $true -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableMultiChannel $true -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableSecuritySignature $false -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -MaxCmds 16384 -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -MaximumConnectionCountPerServer 32 -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -OplocksDisabled $false -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -RequireSecuritySignature $false -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -UseOpportunisticLocking $true -force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -WindowSizeThreshold 2 -force

-WindowSizeThreshold may be good to set to 4 or 8.

Set-SmbServerConfiguration -IrpStackSize 15 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxMpxCount 50 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxWorkItems 1 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -TreatAsStableStorage $false -force

Set-SmbServerConfiguration -EnableBandwidthThrottling $true -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -MaxCmds 50 -force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -WindowSizeThreshold 1 -force

If this is going on, there is more than likely to be a malfunctioning sensor or two. In this situation you’ll need this:

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/

to get the machine to run at good speed. Do be careful with temperatures.

I live in a rather congested wifi neighborhood, there are strong active wifi signals in every house in front and back and next door etcetera. Our wireless routers have all sat next to the exterior wall through which the Cox coax comes through, and for about ten years, through three different wireless router upgrades, I relied on an aluminum flashing sheet placed between the wall and the wireless router, to keep everything as good as possible. Just one room away, line-of-sight through a double doorway without doors, I’d get 3-4 bars only without that sheet. This occurred even though I would check and usually change wifi channels every 3-6 months! The wireless-only Roku is in that room next door, so problems are easy to spot.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago it was wireless-router-buying time again (it has been historically a matter of frustration factor…), and I bought one of these off of eBay:



Initially it was simply a nice, reasonably well-behaved, one-notch improvement over the previous, like all of my previous upgrades. It’s recommendable, but not the purpose of this article. I got four solid bars to the next room over despite the neighborhood, using the flashing, which is what I expected. Still only 2-3 to the bedroom to my sweet wife’s tablet, and worse upstairs. And then I remembered something. Some years before I had bought this pair:



which are standard +9 Dbi wifi antennas, for $20. I had bought them and then realized my router of the time did not have removables. They fit this one. I bought one more, a +12 DBi, to make it three. The originals were the usual stubbies about six inches long, these are more like fourteen.

Five bars in line of sight. Four bars steady everywhere else in the house, including upstairs, and just outside. No flashing anymore. And I haven’t had cause to check wifi environment at all since the better antennas went in.

Wifi devices that have removable antennas, use a very standard connector for those antennas. There are rare exceptions, but the standard is very widespread, especially for indoor models. I will not be buying wireless routers without removable antennas ever again if I have any say in it, and we’ll see if I ever need to replace these antennas!

There are QoS settings which can be made within Windows! They work with desktop and server OSes, to set priorities on either network traffic of specific binaries, or by port and type. If you see programs or services stopping unexpectedly, stuttering, et cetera, this is good to try. Here is a basic guide in PDF:

http://notes.ponderworthy.com/file_download/12/Basic_PC_QoS.pdf

The steps:

1. Load up MMC.EXE.
2. Open the File menu
3. Choose Add/Remove Snap-In.
4. Click Group Policy Object Editor on the left.
5. Click Add.
6. Click Finish.
7. Click OK.
8. Open up Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Windows Settings, Policy-based QoS. You’ll see the following, with the policy list being blank if you haven’t done this yet.

9. Right-click on Policy-based QoS, and choose Create new policy. Set a name, and then set the DSCP value:

The DSCP value is the priority level for the policy. The range is zero through 63. Here is one common DSCP value set:

0 …………………..General Traffic, unprioritized
10 …………………Backups, file transfers, non-business applications
25 …………………Mission-critical data, including SQL, video streaming
34 …………………Video conferencing
46 …………………VoIP

Another set, not quite the same, standardized within the WMM wifi standard:

8-23 ………………Background (BK)
24-31, 0-7 ………Best effort (BE)
32-47 …………….Video (VI)
48-63 …………….Voice (VO)

The above are far from a coherent standard everywhere; one can even find lists which peak at 30. For my needs within PCs, I have been setting my critical apps at 31, important apps at 24, and not bothering with anything else. And it is needful to be conservative. If you QoS some things too high, Windows won’t be able to do background things which keep it running…like, say, the Windows desktop ☺

10. At this point you need to decide on the type of QoS policy you are creating. You create them to work by TCP/UDP port for all applications, for application binaries of specific names, and for HTTP/HTTPS URLs.

11. You may now choose IP address(es) to which the policy applies.

12. And then TCP and/or UDP ports to which the policy applies. Default is TCP only.

And now you’re done with that policy, and you can create as many more as desired.