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Why is Windows so slow?

(games.greggman.com)
337 points kristianp | 1 comments | 19 Dec 11 06:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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prewett ◴[19 Dec 11 09:07 UTC] No.3369039[source]▶
I suspect it has something to do with NTFS updating access times by default. So every time you do anything with a file, it gets its access time updated (not modification time, access time). I don't have windows to test on, but you could try the suggestions [1][2] below.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940846(v=winembedd...

[2] http://oreilly.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html (#8)

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shintoist ◴[19 Dec 11 09:11 UTC] No.3369044[source]▶
But most Linux distros do this by default as well. You have to mount with noatime to get rid of it.
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1. wazoox ◴[19 Dec 11 09:35 UTC] No.3369099[source]▶
In fact nowadays most (all?) linux filesystems use relatime as default, which carries most of the advantages of both atime and noatime. See http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

I don't know if something similar exists under windows (I suppose it doesn't).