←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: 0.455s | source
Show context
jcromartie ◴[19 Dec 11 14:30 UTC] No.3369679[source]▶
Don't forget forking.

To benchmark the maximum shell script performance (in terms of calls to other tools per second), try this micro-benchmark:

    while true; do date; done | uniq -c
Unix shells under Windows (with cygwin, etc.) run about 25 times slower than OS X.
replies(1): >>3370458 #
Mavrik ◴[19 Dec 11 18:17 UTC] No.3370458[source]▶
Well, Unix shells under Windows don't even implement forking, so this test is kinda meaningless isn't it?

It's like racing cars where one of the cars has its wheels taken off.

replies(1): >>3370859 #
1. koenigdavidmj ◴[19 Dec 11 19:48 UTC] No.3370859[source]▶
Cygwin has fork. The problem is that Cygwin's fork has to copy the entire address space into the new process, whereas Linux uses copy-on-write to make forking much faster (you only need to copy the page tables).