Killer Prioritization engine caused issues for some web sites

Question

Since a couple of weeks, I have had issues with services from Atlassian (Jira and Confluence) where performance was really slow and communication sometimes failed. (Issues started in February 2023)

I used Wireshark and could see that there were a lot of "retransmits" on tcp/ip level. They were all for cases where data was sent in two blocks, which made me suspect it had to do with large buffers. For periods it worked fine, but during other periods I could hardly use Jira.

I did not find any similar issue with any other communication. Only Atlassian. So I assumed at first that this was on their side. But none of my collogues had this issue, so this was a bit of a mystery. I also noticed that RDP to my computer was a bit glitchy and thought that this was connected, but did not investigate this further.

In the past NIC hardware offloading have caused all sort of mysterious issues, so I thought this might be the culprit.

So I tried to turn off different type of different type of offloading. And turning off "Large Send offload" (v1 and v2) helped!

I was happy about that. I was still a bit curious why this suddenly became an issue since the NIC driver had not been updated since 2020.

Someone hinted me to this post: Slow Layer Performance with Killer E2400 Network A... - Esri Community

It made me try to turn off the "Killer Prioritization engine" in the Killer Intelligence Center (installed by DELL). Lo and behold, that solved the issue! Now I can have have hardware offloading enabled and all works fine again.

My theory is that something related to this engine was updated earlier this year and caused this issue.

I find it weird to have this "prioritization engine" turned on by default.

Gamal908 · Answer

The Killer Prioritization engine is a feature that is often included in Killer Network Interface Cards (NICs), which is designed to optimize network traffic by prioritizing certain types of data over others.

It is possible that an update to the Killer Prioritization engine caused issues for some web services, as you have experienced. It is also possible that the default settings for the engine were not optimal for your network environment, which could have contributed to the performance issues.

It's always a good idea to check the default settings of any software or hardware that you are using, and adjust them as necessary to ensure optimal performance. In this case, disabling the Killer Prioritization engine seems to have resolved the issue, but it's worth noting that this feature can be useful in certain scenarios, such as gaming or real-time streaming.

Overall, it's important to stay vigilant and keep an eye out for any updates or changes to your network environment that could affect performance.

RoHe · Answer

@thriol - Always include exact PC model and version of Windows in your posts.

Every time Windows Update force-installs an Intel/Killer update, it messes up internet performance, especially on XPS 8930.

You don't need any of the Killer software. So you could disable all Killer services listed in Start>Run>services.msc. Then reboot and see if that helps.

On my XPS 8930, Killer Ethernet works much better without any of that Killer stuff running in the background.

adamw131 · Answer

Just chiming in with a 'me too' to say that I disabled the Killer Prioritization Engine (from within its software settings) and my upload speeds magically went back to normal after it had been at 0.5 mbps for weeks. A pretty disastrous bug from Intel on this that I hope they're fixing. I thought it was my ISP's fault until I started testing things on wifi and elsewhere and all was fine there. A google search finally led me to a post in Microsoft's forum with people discussing the same problem, all within the last 2 months or so. Most people won't even realize they have the problem, let alone try to figure out how to fix it.

RoHe · Answer

@adamw131 There were two problem Killer (Intel) updates force-installed by Windows Update about a month a part, in last ~2 months.

Obviously, Intel isn't testing these updates fully/correctly, but -at least for me- it's always apparent when a new Killer update has been installed because my internet speed drops off to almost nothing.

As soon as that happens, I check in services.msc to see if the 4 Killer services got re-enabled, which means an update was installed. If they're still disabled, that says the problem is with my ISP or elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we have no control over these forced updates, unless we can use Windows Group Policy Editor (Windows Pro versions only) to make the necessary change, or we're willing to hack the Registry to block Windows Update from installing all driver updates.

Sure wish Microsoft would give us a pick/choose option for which driver updates to allow and which ones to block.

ChrisK2731 · Answer

Thx RoHe, I'll try the Start>Run>services.msc as you suggested...and just to clarify, you hit "Stop" on all 4 of the Killer entries showing and immediately rebooted your system? I don't have a "Disable" option. I also have an XPS 8930 with E2400 Controller.

This started with an update from SupportAssist in the early part of this year (2023) for me and was driving me nuts. Almost every website I had to login to was an issue and on pretty much all browsers. I finally saw a quick error message at one point, Searched it, and it lead to this resolution, although I haven't been able to completely "Stop/Disable" the KPE yet, it ultimately keeps re-starting. I have to have the Dashboard open and turn off the KPE every so often, which is annoying.

Does it make more sense to just completely remove this Program at this point? Seems more harm than benefit, now.

RoHe · Answer

@ChrisK2731&#xa0; - Click Start>Run>services.msc. When that opens, double-click each Killer entry. Each one should have a Startup type option to disable the service. Reboot when all Killer services are disabled. Just stopping these services won't prevent them from being started again at next boot.

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Killer Prioritization engine caused issues for some web sites

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