Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared

SeaBait writes: "This revealing article about the High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows shows that Linux rules. The performance testing was on Pipes(interprocess communication mechanism available on both Windows and Linux and UNIX). Although I new Linux would fare the best, the poor performance of Windows XP was a surprise. Windows 2000 actually did better than XP!"

Comments

Premature

[johnnyb]

This is very premature. This was only testing ONE aspect of Windows vs Linux, which is not even used very much in the Windows world. This is meant to be an overall test of Windows vs Linux in performance, but the article is going to span over several weeks/months. Only after the series is finished will a good comparison be made. To say that Linux rocks just because it's pipes are faster means jack squat. What if Windows sockets are faster? What if Windows Disk IO is faster? What about Windows Asynchronous I/O? Eventually, this article series will answer such questions. However, this article ONLY answered the question of whose pipes are faster. Nothing else should be read into it.

Re:Premature

[tmark]

What if Windows sockets are faster? What if Windows Disk IO is faster? What about Windows Asynchronous I/O?

I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here, they would be roundly and loudly shot down with 1) criticisms of the testing protocol, and/or 2) criticisms of the bias of the testing agency. Of course, the same criticisms are just as valid in this case, but of course they are here largely ignored (one poster so far excepted).

All of which just goes to show that the essence of the whole 'Linux-rocks/Windows-sucks' horse that is always being flogged here is that this horse is ultimately flogged by (sometimes blind) faith. Few of the Linux zealots here are going to believe any benchmark/test unless it favors Linux (in which case, they will all praise the study to high heaven) - just look at the lengths people here go to argue that GNOME/KDE provide better-than-mediocre desktops. Similarly, few Windows advocates are going to be convinced that their platform of choice is inferior.

Since all these articles thus amount to preaching to the converted, I suggest that the Slashdot editing team hereafter mark all such articles of theirs as 'Redundant'.

Hey, why can't we rate parent Slashdot articles, anyways ??

pipes for IPC on windows?

[kangasloth]

Who you kidding? I'm no windows developer, but even I know you don't use pipes for IPC in windows, it's all COM. COM on windows versus CORBA or DCOP might be interesting.

And yet it still sells...

[MosesJones]

You'd almost think that a half-decent GUI and a huge set of tools were the most important things rather than inter-process communication.

Amazing. Stunningly the IBM OS/390 wipes the floor with all of these entries. Great desktop machine. Linux is a good OS, its not the best, it doesn't beat Solaris for reliability, it doesn't beat Windows for usability, and it doesn't come near the Mainframe architectures for speed. But it does have its place, but petty things like this are surely pointless. If a HCI group found that Linux was _easier_ to use, then that would be something to applaud but in the days of Gigabit networks and massive processor speeds and huge RAM these sorts of performance things are less important than ever.

The key to success is ease of use, ease of deployment, Linux is getting there, but having fast pipes won't progress it.

Re:And yet it still sells...

[jgerman]

, but petty things like this are surely pointless. If a HCI group found that Linux was _easier_ to use, then that would be something to applaud but in the days of Gigabit networks and massive processor speeds and huge RAM these sorts of performance things are less important than ever.

Thus spake the virgin programmer. That bullshit about hardware invalidating the need for fast efficient code, is the bullshit rhetoric taught in college classes that brought us the blue screen of death in the first place. Speed and performance do matter as does not hogging memory and efficiency. You will always run into limits on what a machine can do, and in the case of business, writing code that allows 5 servers to do the work of ten at helf the bandwidth is a big deal.

The key to success has already been gained by Linux, it is used by the people who matter (not matter as in personal worth but matter as in matter to the advancement of computing). I couldn't give two shits about Joe Schmoe who wants to check his email and surf for porn, let him use Windows, it's not necessary for everyone to use the same operating system. Use the right tool for the job, and for developement *nix is the best tool.

Re:Can you say "flamebait"?

[benwb]

Especially since Pipes are basically unused for server applications on Windows. The only significant place that Microsoft still recommends their use is when your connecting to a SQL Server database that resides on the same box as you components. Other than that you're pretty much dealing with console processes. Windows has much better IPC mechanism (COM and COM+ Events and Method Calls, Local Procedure Calls, Memory Mapped Files...)

Re:Can you say "flamebait"?

[little alfalfa]

The big deal about this one is that the testing is done by a real company. It's written by a senior programmer at IBM. Many of us would hesitate to dismiss what he says here. This is not some sponsored study as were many tests that have been done in the past.

Hardware manufacturers want slow software.

[Futurepower(tm)]

"... the poor performance of Windows XP was a surprise. Windows 2000 actually did better than XP!"

This has been happening since the days of the VAX minicomputers, and probably before. Hardware manufacturers want slow, poor performing software, because that makes users buy more hardware. Most of Microsoft's sales are to hardware manufacturers, not to users.


Secrecy destroys democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?

Re:Written by IBM?

[johnnyb]

The nice thing about the tests is that all of the information about the tests are published, as well as the scope of what the test means (it has a very small scope of applicability). So, it's easy for anyone to reproduce the tests, and mention any problems with the tests.

Pipe speeds

[jd]

The relevence of this comparison escapes me, for the moment. Hey, I'm no Windows fan, but most benchtests for ANY one parameter invariably produce a wildly misleading result.

Some things to ponder:

• How fast are Linux pipes, if you patch the kernel with LSM? MOSIX? A different scheduler? (eg: RTSCHED, RT-Linux, RTHAL, HP's Scheduler Plugin Architecture?)
  
• How long can a given OS sustain a given data rate, under different conditions? (eg: Many processes running, non-interruptable events, miltiple processors, etc.)
  
• What kind of resources are consumed, per pipe, per unit of data, per unit time? Do any of the OS' allow/use smoothing, to reduce system load?
  
• What results do you get for architectures at the extreme ends of each OS? (ie: Compare ALL the OS' on the minimum suggested and maximum usable settings for Linux, Windows XP, Windows 2000. See if there is a range in which one OS has the advantage, rather than assuming that if it has the advantage at one point, it must have the advantage always.)
  

This is not to diss IBM, or even to suggest Windows XP/2000 would even win in such a battle, although I suspect they would for massive SMP arrays, simply because Linux doesn't handle those as well.

I also suspect Linux would find itself struggling, when put into a hard real-time setting, an ultra-secure setting, or a distributed setting. The overheads involved would not be huge, but if you have a huge number of processes, each with the maximum number of open pipes, the overheads are being applied a huge number of times. That adds up.

All in all, this suggests that some really severe, rigorous benchmarking needs to be done, under a wide enough variety of conditions to be meaningful. This test just doesn't meet the kinds of conditions I'd expect from a truly determined test.

Now, if I can only convince IBM to loan me a few dozen boxes, I'd be more than happy to do the testing for them... :)

Run on a Thinkpad?

[corky6921]

In the discussion forums, the guy who posted these results admits, "I ran the tests on a thinkpad."

I'm sorry, but what does this prove? Linux runs better on a laptop? Is he comparing Linux, the server OS, to Windows 2000 Pro, the consumer OS? What version of Windows XP is he running?

These tests are really subjective, not only because pipes aren't really used in Windows, but also because he used a laptop to test it (and didn't give details of the Windows OSes he was running.) If anything, I wish he would have used some bigger iron (a Xeon-based system, perhaps, or some of IBM's middle-of-the-line servers.)

I think the best conclusion we can draw from this is that Linux may indeed be a better OS than Windows in some ways, but that this test doesn't prove it.