{"id":35653,"date":"2005-05-12T08:57:48","date_gmt":"2005-05-12T08:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/05\/12\/the-microsoft-corporate-network-1-7-times-worse-than-hell\/"},"modified":"2005-05-12T08:57:48","modified_gmt":"2005-05-12T08:57:48","slug":"the-microsoft-corporate-network-1-7-times-worse-than-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050512-48\/?p=35653","title":{"rendered":"The Microsoft corporate network: 1.7 times worse than hell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I&#8217;m going to tell a story from 1996. Why?  Because I can.\n One of the tests performed by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/whdc\/whql\/\"> Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)<\/a> was the NCT packet stress test which had the nickname &#8220;Hell&#8221;. The purpose of the test was to flood a network card with an insane number of packets, in order to see how it handled extreme conditions. It uncovered packet-dropping bugs, timing problems, all sorts of great stuff. Network card vendors used it to determine what size internal hardware buffers should be in order to cover &#8220;all reasonable network traffic scenarios&#8221;.\n It so happened that at the time this test had currency (1996 era), the traffic on the Microsoft corporate network was approximately <strong>1.7&nbsp;times worse<\/strong> than the NCT packet stress test. A card could pass the Hell test with flying colors, yet drop 90% of its packets when installed on a computer at Microsoft because the card simply couldn&#8217;t keep up with the traffic.\n The open secret among network card vendors was, &#8220;If you want your card to work with Windows, submit one card to WHQL and send another to a developer on the Windows team.&#8221;\n (This rule applied to hardware other than network cards. I was &#8220;gifted&#8221; a sound card from a major manufacturer and installed it on my main machine. It wasn&#8217;t long before I found and fixed a crashing bug in their driver.)<\/p>\n<p> [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I&#8217;m going to tell a story from 1996. Why? Because I can. One of the tests performed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) was the NCT packet stress test which had the nickname &#8220;Hell&#8221;. The purpose of the test was to flood a network card with an insane number of packets, in order to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-35653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Today I&#8217;m going to tell a story from 1996. Why? Because I can. One of the tests performed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) was the NCT packet stress test which had the nickname &#8220;Hell&#8221;. The purpose of the test was to flood a network card with an insane number of packets, in order to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}