The network impact of a Windows 8 RT device on your network.

Edited!

So someone had this question.  It’s a good one.  I didn’t know the answer so I found out….

Articles here and here would indicate that network traffic should be both intermittent and light.  So….lets check it out.

The Test:   I built a Windows 8 VM in my lab.  Updated it, updated default Windows Store Applications, created a new user account that I had never logged in as and then setup a netsh trace session from an elevated command prompt:

mkdir c:\trace

cd c:\trace

netsh trace LAN capture=yes report=yes tracefile=c:\trace\file.etl

And then I logged out and logged into the new ID.  The plan was to run it for 20-30 minutes but I went downstairs to talk to the wife and you know how that goes so an hour or so later I remembered my test!  Went upstairs and logged out, logged in as my administrator user and opened an elevated command prompt and did:

cd c:\trace

netsh trace stop

It looked like this:

Which isn’t horribly exciting, but the etl file and file.cab file are

So I put them on my debugging machine via SkyDrive and went to town.

The Results:

Very little traffic, most of it in spurts, every 5 minutes as expected. 

You can see it in the graphic above.  I’ll actually need to do a longer trace to get a better feel for statistics, but I wouldn’t sweat a Windows 8 RT or Pro device on your network.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The question that got me looking into this in particular was how many proxy connections does a single Windows RT device create.  From looking at a default configuration of live tiles updating, it appears to be one session from the WNS. The debate will shift then to how each application impacts performance of the network I suppose.

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2013
  How can i know the impact only in trace? is not safe...

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2013
  Nice post!  The proof is in the puddin'.