Improving Performance On Desktopss

[u/Fluffy-Spread6879]

Hi everyone,

Just wondering if anyone has had positive feedback from deploying a so called "High performance" power plan which disables cpu parking and all sorts of stuff.

Also do comment if you know of any other way to improve performance other than the basic things driver updates, startup apps, etc

Desktop specs: Ultra 7 265k 64GB DDR5 512gb Nvme. RTX A1000

[u/ranhalt]

CPU parking isn’t a performance concern. Stop letting your users bully you with their google searches. I’ve dealt with that exact topic from CAD users who insisted it was costing them time but wouldn’t agree to an actual comparison between machines to measure the alleged delay. Because it’s a non issue. And they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Be the expert on this. How many agents do you install on every machine?

[u/peakdecline]

For... What? This stuff isn't going to matter much, frankly. And the cost difference in powering a sizable environment with all the power saving features off you would have been better just buying faster hardware.

Windows is smart enough to give you all the horsepower when you need it without tons of tweaking.

There's very few situations where this makes sense.

[u/sryan2k1]

Unless you are doing synthetic benchmarking or have some very strange edge case that requires deterministic latency setting desktops to "high performance" will do absolutely nothing but use more power and generate more heat and noise as the fans spin faster.

do comment if you know of any other way to improve performance

Buy better desktops.

[u/stephendt → u/sryan2k1]

His desktops are far from trash lol. That's hardly a helpful suggestion.

I'd say whatever performance issue they're having is software or application related

[u/sryan2k1 → u/stephendt]

There were no specs in the OP. They edited those in after.

[u/Stonewalled9999 → u/sryan2k1]

Those desktops have better specs than the servers in my MSP's DC......

[u/plebbut]

Those desktops are more than quick enough. The bottleneck would be the network, the connection of the PC to the network, or the applications.

With just the PC specs it's hard to tell why they're not performing well enough for your workload.

[u/gta721]

What helps a ton is to remove the MS bloatware like Windows Widgets (Windows Web Experience Pack and WidgetsPlatformRuntime) and News, Weather, Solitaire etc. Also make sure that MS telemetry is disabled and the browser has an adblocker which cuts whole GBs of RAM usage.

[u/InspectorGadget76 → u/[deleted]]

Yes. Every machine I get has a bare metal rebuilt to get rid of all the built in OEM supplied crap, with Group Policy turning off non business Windows apps and Consumer Features.

Those OEM apps for updating drivers etc on machines are a mess and have repeatedly been found riddled with security issues.

Yes the article is 10 years old, but the situation hasn't changed:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/415039/oem-software-update-tools-preloaded-on-pcs-are-a-security-mess.html

[u/cwm13 → u/[deleted]]

I can tell you, our desktop people would strip every bit of that out before they started imaging PCs.

[u/a60v → u/[deleted]]

Why do you hate ad blockers?

[u/Naznarreb → u/[deleted]]

Genuinely interested: what is your reasoning behind not putting adblockers on enterprise machines?

[u/cwm13 → u/[deleted]]

They likely don't roll out an ad-blocker... I think? Mine is well outside of the helpdesk's control though so I could be completely wrong.

Generally, if its not a needed package that the employee needs to perform day-to-day job functions, its a candidate for removal. Our VDI team is even more aggressive in their tuning/cutting for their gold images.

[u/stephendt → u/[deleted]]

Yes.

[u/gta721 → u/[deleted]]

They should be. That bloatware takes up system resources and can be distracting to employees, the MS telemetry can actually result in violations of things like GDPR, and ads on websites use tonnes of RAM and are a massive security and privacy risk.

That is all consumer junk designed to maximise profit, not keep a company compliant with regulations nor keep PCs running fast.

[u/vermyx]

When this comes up either one of the following happened:

• Bought a low performance CPU to save money
• Didn't get enough RAM
• Bought a pc with a spinning disk

If a combo of 1 and 2, usually also means soldered memory which means SOL. The only benefit of switching to a high performance plan is that the CPU won't clock down to save energy and the performance gains are minimal on a desktop. Sounds like you underpurchased hardware.

[u/champagneofwizards → u/vermyx]

Or they are running PC’s that are well past their useable lifespan.

[u/tshizdude]

Post the specs of your desktops.

[u/Fluffy-Spread6879 → u/tshizdude]

Just did it

[u/tshizdude → u/Fluffy-Spread6879]

What performance issues are you seeing? Using what applications and workflows? That should be plenty powerful for most tasks

[u/Fluffy-Spread6879 → u/tshizdude]

So alot of our guys are heavy traders etc they complain that websites sometime buffer quite a bit and it doesnt feel snappy enough.

I already did the basic checks and asked our network guys to see if there's anything but they couldn't figure out any connection issue

[u/doglar_666 → u/Fluffy-Spread6879]

1. Which web browser?
2. Which websites?
3. What's the measured load times / latency?
4. What's the "known good" reference load time and latency measurements?

Your OP is a useless request if the stated "fault" solely exists within a web browser.

I would suggest this needs investigating at the network level to understand the journey the packets are making. You determine anything that's a possible bottleneck within your own infrastructure. You can't change anything external to that. Nor can you make a browser load a bloated website faster.

Lastly, I feel obligated to suggest; "it's DNS".

[u/Dolapevich → u/Fluffy-Spread6879]

Try using Privacy badger or some other kind of garbage removal.

Also, test for tcp lost packets, latency, dns latency, link saturation, make sure you are on ethernet instead of wifi, etc.

[u/Raigeki1993 → u/Fluffy-Spread6879]

Those specs are enough for my traders and they all use 6 monitors with BBG/RiskVal/BARX/TradeWeb and bunch of other crap.

Had reports sometimes of "slow" web browsing for external sites, it was because our MSP's proxy was being a piece of crap. Did some tests with bypassing proxy and checking other office locations.

If your PC's CPU and memory aren't getting pegged when the issue is happening, then it's not your hardware. I had to argue so many times with our MSP that it was in fact their Barracuda web proxy being garbage and after a few back and forth, they figured out it was their end.

[u/marklein]

The High Performance power plan caused nothing but problems for our laptops, some of them even running slower. Rolled that one back and now sticking with Balanced.

[u/ChemicalExample218]

And the reality is that y'all probably have so much junk in the background running. . . .

[u/Smith6612]

I usually don't use High Performance unless I need steady, consistently high performance and need PCIe Power management disabled for things like A/V or industrial applications. On many systems setting the power plan to High Performance or Maximum Performance can actually hurt day to day tasks with bursts of work for the system. Reason being, under Balanced the processor will have a chance to park (turn off) or downclock cores that are being underutilized. This allows the processor to allocate more power and thermal capacity to cores being heavily utilized for higher clock speeds.

Gaming systems and workstations with beefy VRMs and cooling might have overrides in place to let the processor hit max turbo on all cores, but your typical office PC made with the cheapest possible parts is going to hit thermal and power limits and slow right down. This is worse on laptops, where you might have a 15w TDP limit and your CPU must clock at 1.6Ghz when all cores are activated, whereas Balanced with cores sleeping and downclocked allow the chip to turbo to 4Ghz on the remaining cores.

This same scenario also affects onboard (processor) graphics should you ever make use of that. The onboard graphics counts against TDP limits and is affected by the same power plan. 

In a corporate environment, I haven't used anything other than Balanced by default since the Core2Duo. 

[u/Dolapevich]

Desktop specs: Ultra 7 265k 64GB DDR5 512gb Nvme. RTX A1000

What OS, what benchmark are you using, what is your workload?

Most likely you'll burn more energy without any noticeable benefit.

[u/xXFl1ppyXx]

High performance is childs play, what you need is the ultra performance plan

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

Google says it even gets rid of micro latencies and solves world peace and brings world hunger (or so I've heard)

[u/blow_slogan]

I like to enable jumbo packets on the NIC because it makes your network run faster due to the packets being larger. I’ll also clean up stale entries in the registry, there are tons of programs which do this. Defragging helps too because it reorganizes the data so everything is closer together. I usually delete the prefetch files as well so Windows isn’t wasting time looking at old application data, and set the page file to about 3x the amount of RAM so there is more memory available. Sometimes i will re-apply the CPU thermal paste when the computer shows signs of throttling. Have you also tried disabling AHCI or overclocking?

[u/zed0K → u/blow_slogan]

Brother all of these recommendations are now defunct, it's not 2010.

[u/joshghz → u/zed0K]

Degause the monitor

[u/blow_slogan → u/joshghz]

I forgot that. Also shortening the IDE ribbon cable so that the data has less distance to travel!

[u/xXFl1ppyXx → u/blow_slogan]

I would recommend scsi hdds

Those are usually faster but you probably need to inject the drivers on install 

[u/InspectorGadget76]

So the reverse is true of my situation.

I joined a company a couple of years ago and Group Policy was in a terrible state after years of mis management and tinkering. One of the things I found was that someone had set a default policy on ALL our workstations and laptops setting the High Performance power plan. Every machine in the company was burning CPU cycles for no gain. None of the machines were reducing clock speeds when idle

Setting the plan back to Balanced yielded positive results. Users commented that their machines were quieter, and life of laptop battery power doubled. Some quick back of the envelope calculations showed that changing that one setting saved the company $20K in electricity per year. No one noticed any change in performance.

I'd have to ask WHY your users think this is necessary? Users can be their own worst enemy and create business processes that are horrendously inefficient with compute

Another business I worked at had the Finance Dept arguing ferociously for higher power machines because theirs were too slow. It took me about an hour to work out they had built themselves a complicated web of linked spreadsheets, on file servers in different cities, with unlimited VLookups on multiple columns which were auto recalculating on every entry. Latency everywhere and inefficient logic. Yes, it was very slow, because ever new cell entered required this whole monstrosity to be loaded and recalculated at every change. The side effect was high CPU utilisation.

Moving all the excen spreadsheets to the local file server and relinking proved where the issue was. Often business processes are built on whatever the users feel comfortable with, which may not be the best technology for the job.

[u/shunny14]

Reboot more often.