Why does SYNC cause long pauses?

A: Beware that many new network cards, especially onboard network ports have power management configurable SEPARATE from the power management control in Control Panel.

We've had occasional reports of machines that don't crash or terminate, but rather just pause/freeze up for long periods of time and if left alone, they simply resume normal operation and become responsive after several seconds to a minute or longer.

If your machine suddenly pauses and freezes up for many seconds to a minute or longer and then just simply wakes up and continues to run normally without you having to reboot anything, it is likely a network card that has gone to sleep due to a power management setting in the network card's properties.

Under device manager, you should always check the network card properties, and if you see a tab for power management, disable power management and wake up options. So little power is saved that this feautre is unnecessary and it can cause problems.

When a network card is shut down by the OS, any network call to any file going over the network will be paused by the OS while it waits for the network card to turn on. Disabling any normal "time out" that would normally let the rest of the operating system (and our program) continue doing it's thing while waiting for the network card to complete the request.

In the case of audio playback, even though we have audio playing through a different thread, and EVEN when all the audio is on the local hard-drive - something as simple as browsing a network source, updating the system clock through 3rd party time sync software, or using our sync/transfer or other similar functions which seek over a network connection can cause the entire system to pause for many seconds (a minute or longer) if a network card has been turned off by the OS and needs to be turned on.

So add this to the multitude of things you know better to disable and shut off in Windows. Power management on network cards is definitely one thing we believe is more trouble than it's worth. And because network cards do not sometimes show up as a listed choice in the control panel/power management section - it's easy to overlook.

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