Is Linux really faster than MS Windows ?

[mark at mark.mielke.cc]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 12:52:56PM +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:
> Saying that "in the linux world, bootup still is such a small slice of
> the pie" is a sure way to keep linux confined in the server/hackers
> for hacking pleasure niche. Whether one cares is another thing, of
> course.

Yes, it is. And ensuring that this thinking stays in place is the only
thing that will *keep* Linux more secure, more stable, and so on, than
other operating systems. :-)

This sort of debate isn't going to go anywhere. Not blaming you M. -
you were just the article I thought worthy of a response. :-)

People think what they think, and that's how it will stay, especially
for things as arbitrary as 'do most people reboot their machines
frequently', 'is Linux more stable?', 'is Linux faster?', or 'is Linux
more secure?'.

As for my opinion, which will no doubt be completely ignored by the
majority of readers, as their experiences will no doubt trump mine:

Is Linux more secure? People regularly pound on my Linux box, trying
to get in. I have to assume that a large (and growing) percentage of
users don't have as tight of a firewall as I do, and that some of
these attempts succeed, otherwise these 'hackers' (*cough* 'crackers'
*cough*) wouldn't be having a go at it. Why would they spend so much
effort on a task that won't succeed?

For Linux being more stable? As soon as I add certain modules into my
kernel, the required reboot time drops to about once a week - not
really much better than a Windows box - the Windows box which also has
such modules installed into the kernel, causing an equivalent problem.

Is Linux faster? This is highly arbitrary. Linux, especially with
linux 2.6, has low latency. The computer is responsive to my mouse
clicks, and so on. Windows has made similar improvement from their
side. Depending on the application, I'd say that the potential is
about equal in terms of latency. For anybody unaware, latency affects
the 'feel' of your operating system. Does it 'feel' fast. It doesn't
necessarily make it faster. In fact, I'm positive that the latency
patches have a small negative impact on performance. It costs to make
your computer more responsive. So, if we ignore the 'feel' of the
system as being arbitrary or inaccurate, we come to - what is meant by
faster? It can't be the CPU execution speed, because that has to be
equivalent. So, what next? The speed of the file system? Linux gives
many more options than Windows does out of the box, so Linux probably
has an advantage here - assuming that users pick the right file system
for their uses. The speed of the system pager? Assuming the normal LRU
scheme, both should be equivalent, and both have a bottleneck of the
read and write speed of the hard disk.

>From my personal application-side experiences, I've noted that Linux
spawns processes much faster than Windows. For applications that were
written to require new commands to be executed as new processes very
frequently, Linux will destroy Windows.

The SMB file system seems difficult to tune, or generally inefficient
compared to alternatives such as NFS. For users who don't need to access
files over a network, this doesn't matter. For the rest of us, it may or
may not matter.

On the other side, I've found that Windows manages to beat Linux for
certain frequent operations that a desktop user would perform, such as
"time to launch a web browser". Internet Explorer launches very
quickly.  Those who are aware will claim that this is a trick -
Windows has already loaded much of Internet Explorer by the time the
user clicks the button to launch an actual Internet Explorer
window. Fact is, though, desktop users don't care. Why doesn't Linux
employ these techniques? Why should I wait even 3 seconds for my web
browser to come up? I want it immediately, and I don't particularly
care how you do it.

I'm sure I've missed dozen of considerations... :-)

My point, though, is that the battle field isn't exactly comparable,
and for most users, many of these considerations are irrelevant. Only
geeks get off on these sorts of things. Non-geeks just want their
system to boot up fast, login fast, let them get what they want to do
fast, and be safe if they happen to hit the <OFF> key to switch off
their computer.

mark

P.S. For context purposes - I'm one of those people with a two 24/7 Linux
     AMD boxes consuming power, a 24/7 Linux hardware wireless router,
     and a Windows XP notebook for my desktop. I VNC into the Linux boxes
     from the Windows boxes giving me a 'best of both worlds'. Why should
     I pick Linux over Windows when I don't have to?

-- 
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