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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: 0.863s | source
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niyazpk ◴[19 Dec 11 07:45 UTC] No.3368875[source]▶
Here is a link from the comments:

NTFS Performance Hacks - http://oreilly.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html

replies(1): >>3368934 #
yread ◴[19 Dec 11 08:13 UTC] No.3368934[source]▶
Not sure about the other things, but this

The default cluster size on NTFS volumes is 4K, which is fine if your files are typically small and generally remain the same size. But if your files are generally much larger or tend to grow over time as applications modify them, try increasing the cluster size on your drives to 16K or even 32K to compensate. That will reduce the amount of space you are wasting on your drives and will allow files to open slightly faster.

is wrong. When you increase cluster size you will definitely not "reduce the amount of space you are wasting". 100B file will still occupy the whole 16KB ( so you will waste 15.9KB on it instead of 3.9KB with 4KB clusters.

Also I would be very careful with taking advice like that from an article which is 6 years old (before introduction of Win7 or XP SP3!)

replies(3): >>3369053 #>>3369075 #>>3369219 #
1. rbanffy ◴[19 Dec 11 10:47 UTC] No.3369219[source]▶
I haven't used Windows as my primary OS for almost a decade and haven't even booted it on bare metal for the past couple years, so my guesses must be taken with a grain of salt. I always found directory fragmentation (much more than file fragmentation) to be a huge performance problem on Windows. If increasing cluster size effectively reduces directory fragmentation, your life under Windows will be much better.