←back to thread

Why is Windows so slow?

(games.greggman.com)
337 points kristianp | 1 comments | 19 Dec 11 06:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
Show context
etfb ◴[19 Dec 11 07:15 UTC] No.3368812[source]▶
Someone posted the question on StackOverflow and it got closed as "not constructive". Is there a way to browse the "not constructive" questions on SO? They seem to be all the best ones.
replies(5): >>3368826 #>>3368833 #>>3368834 #>>3368904 #>>3368948 #
Mithrandir ◴[19 Dec 11 07:21 UTC] No.3368826[source]▶
Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6916011/how-do-i-get-wind... (By the author)

Top Answer:

Unless a hardcore windows systems hacker comes along, you're not going to get more than partisan comments (which I won't do) and speculation (which is what I'm going to try).

1. File system - You should try the same operations (including the dir) on the same filesystem. I came across this which benchmarks a few filesystems for various parameters.

2. Caching. I one tried to run a compilation on Linux on a ramdisk and found that it was slower than running it on disk thanks to the way the kernel takes care of caching. This is a solid selling point for Linux and might be the reason why the performance is so different.

3. Bad dependency specifications on windows. Maybe the chromium dependency specifications for Windows are not as correct as for Linux. This might result in unnecessary compilations when you make a small change. You might be able to validate this using the same compiler toolchain on Windows.

replies(1): >>3368871 #
buster ◴[19 Dec 11 07:42 UTC] No.3368871[source]▶
Why should he run the ls command on ntfs rather then a native file system? In all it was a "windows vs linux" test and not a fileystem test. Testing the same filesystem wouldn't make sense here
replies(1): >>3368885 #
jharsman ◴[19 Dec 11 07:47 UTC] No.3368885[source]▶
Presumably to find out whether the difference lies with the filesystem or somewhere else?

If Linux is still much faster, even with the same filesystem, you have eliminated one variable.

replies(2): >>3368958 #>>3369207 #
1. buster ◴[19 Dec 11 08:25 UTC] No.3368958[source]▶
Doing some profiling and system/kernel level analysis would be much saner, imo. What's the sense in measuring how some non-native filesystem behaves? In the end you'll be benchmarking how good is fuse-ntfs vs. in-kernel-ext4 and figuring it's slower... I say, profile some code and see how much time is spent in filesystem calls.