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Why is Windows so slow?

(games.greggman.com)
337 points kristianp | 5 comments | 19 Dec 11 06:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.045s | source
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hristov ◴[19 Dec 11 08:31 UTC] No.3368965[source]▶
Interestingly enough Joel Spolsky mentioned something related to the directory listing problem more than 10 years ago. See:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

In Joel's opinion it is an algorithm problem. He thinks that there is an O(n^2) algorithm in there somewhere causing trouble. And since one does not notice the O(n^2) unless there are hundreds of files in a directory it has not been fixed.

I believe that is probably the problem with Windows in general. Perhaps there are a lot of bad algorithms hidden in the enormous and incredibly complex Windows code base and they are not getting fixed because Microsoft has not devoted resources to fixing them.

Linux on the other hand benefits from the "many eyes" phenomenon of open source and when anyone smart enough notices slowness in Linux they can simply look in the code and find and remove any obviously slow algorithms. I am not sure all open source software benefits from this but if any open source software does, it must certainly be Linux as it is one of the most widely used and discussed pieces of OS software.

Now this is total guesswork on my part but it seems the most logical conclusion. And by the way, I am dual booting Windows and Linux and keep noticing all kinds weird slowness in Windows. Windows keeps writing to disk all the time even though my 6 GB of RAM should be sufficient, while in Linux I barely hear the sound of the hard drive.

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1. fauigerzigerk ◴[19 Dec 11 09:35 UTC] No.3369098[source]▶
I just wish the "many eyes" phenomenon worked equally well for device drivers.
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2. praptak ◴[19 Dec 11 10:04 UTC] No.3369148[source]▶
Unfortunately most of the drivers are in the long tail of unpopular devices. This results in greatly reducing the average number of eyes per driver.

This has a double effect: there are less developers who can attempt to fix problems with a driver and second, the incentive seems smaller - make general I/O 0.5% faster and you're a hero of the public, fix a critical problem in an unpopular device driver and maybe 1 person notices.

replies(1): >>3369235 #
3. fauigerzigerk ◴[19 Dec 11 10:56 UTC] No.3369235[source]▶
Exactly. I'm afraid this isn't a solvable problem. Device makers must be responsible for device drivers, open source or not.
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4. ConceptJunkie ◴[19 Dec 11 17:39 UTC] No.3370314{3}[source]▶
Generally, they are. They get their Windows compatibility certification and everything.

Oh, wait, you mean for Linux? Good luck with that. The sad thing is that either providing drivers for Linux or providing detailed enough specs that drivers can be written by the OSS community offers little for no payback for the effort. As a Linux user, I feel lucky that any hardware manufacturers even acknowledge people might be running something other than Microsoft.

When you're in bed with Microsoft, you probably have even more reasons to blow off the OSS community. The sweaty chair-chucker wouldn't like it, and you don't want to get him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

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5. mdda ◴[19 Dec 11 23:55 UTC] No.3371639{4}[source]▶
That's what they used to say about IE vs the open source community. But somehow, programmers' nature finds a way...