Publications

From the abstract:

This paper [...] presents early results from a latency study of Windows NT that identifies some specific causes of long thread scheduling latencies, many of which delay the dispatching of runnable threads for tens of milliseconds. Reasons for these delays, including technical, methodological, and economic are presented and possible solutions are discussed. [...] In nearly all cases the reasons we discovered via instrumentation and measurement surprised us. In fact, some directly contradicted "facts" we thought we "knew".

From the abstract:

We compare the performance of Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 under load from office, multimedia and engineering applications on a personal computer (PC) of modest power that is free of legacy hardware. We report our observations using a complementary pair of system performance measures, interrupt and thread latency, that capture the ability of the OS to support multimedia and real-time workloads in a way that traditional throughput-based performance measures miss. We use the measured latency distributions to evaluate the quality of service that a WDM driver can expect to receive on both OSs, irrespective of whether the driver uses thread-based or interrupt-based processing.

You will need to be(come) a member of the Usenix Association to view the entire text of this article. This costs $80 per year for individuals; for NT driver professionals, this one article just about justifies it.

A presentation from WinHec 99, based on the same study as above.

You can also download the PowerPoint slides directly from this link:
audio2.zip (89 KB download)

From the intro:

I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release.

In other words, learn why experienced NT driver writers keep a copy of VMS Internals and Data Structures handy!