Why is Windows so slow?

I'm disappointed HN! There is a lot of pontificating, but not much science here.

It takes all of 2 minutes to try this experiment yourself (plus ~8 minutes for the download).

1. Download chromium http://chromium-browser-source.commondatastorage.googleapis....

2. Unzip to a directory

3. Create this batch file in the src directory, I called mine "test.bat"

    echo start: %time% >> timing.txt
    dir /s > list.txt
    echo end: %time% >> timing

4. Run test.bat from a command prompt, twice.

Paste your output in this thread. Here is mine:

    start: 12:00:41.30 
    end: 12:00:41.94 
    start: 12:00:50.66 
    end: 12:00:51.31

First pass: 640ms; Second pass: 650ms

I can't replicate the OP's claim of 40000ms directory seek, even though I have WORSE hardware. Would be interested in other people's results. Like I said, it only takes 2 minutes.

Wow, you are awesome for posting facts! I have often wondered if it was some systemic thing about the centrally-managed setups of Windows at Google that was making the Chrome build suck so much (such as some aggressive antivirus, as people often suggest in these situations). My recollection is that people run into the same slow build problems on non-Google-owned Windows computers, but perhaps that "slow" is a different slow than the OP's problem.

(For comparison, I have an older checkout on this Linux laptop. It's around 145ms to list, and it's 123k files. The original post mentions 350k files, which is a significantly different number. It makes me wonder if he's got something else busted, like "git gc" turned off, creating lots of git objects in the same directory producing some O(n^2) directory listing problem. But it could just as well be something like build outputs from multiple configurations.)