Zune team,
I figured out how to improve the performance of music playback on zune.net.
Normally the playback cuts out momentarily whenever I mouse over an interactive button like Silverlight or Java on zune.net or any site.
When I open the popout player in IE8, the Silverlight application that runs it automatically sets its system process priority to "Above normal". There are usually two processes when one tab is open: IE8's main process and a separate process for that tab. When you open more tabs, the main process assigns several to the process with the first tab, but then creates another process for subsequent tabs. When that process has several, it creates another one, and so on.
Because the main process treats the popout player as a new tab (adding it to a process instead of creating another process), and because the process containing the popout is set to "Above normal" priority, tabs in other processes do not cause the music playback to stutter, because they have a lower priority. But the tabs in the same process as the popout player do.
So to increase performance, I opened new tabs until a new process was created, and then opened zune.net in that tab so it would be in the new process. I opened the popout player, and then closed the tab with zune.net.
Bing! Performance problem solved.
If the Zune team can configure the Silverlight application to open in a seperate process every time, and force subsequent tabs to open in another process, many playback performance issues would be improved. If Silverlight can set its tab's processing priority, it can probably do this.
Because my computer is very slow, I don't know whether interactive content is causing anyone else problems, but I would really appreciate it if the Zune team would improve playback performance on the website.
User devices:
Zune HD 32GB
