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

This should come as no surprise

[sting3r]

Windows pipes are much lower on the evolutionary ladder than Linux IPC mechanisms. Consider:

• Windows pipes cannot exist in arbitrary places on the filesystem. Therefore service hijackings are easy if you can DOS the existing service into dying. On Linux, an ordinary user can't create /dev/log or /dev/printer (even if they kill syslogd/lpd), but on Windows anyone can name a pipe whatever they want (as long as it doesn't already exist).
• Windows pipes have no access control. Hmm, didn't SANS just report on the sorry state of Windows security?
• Windows pipes do not support ancillary data or OOB data. This makes them limited communication facilities.
• Linux pipes use copy-on-write instead of straight out copying. Therefore the paging mechanisms enhance speed because the data is simply remapped, not manually copied.
• Linux provides a much richer set of IPC mechanisms, such as semaphores, shm, messages, as well as the socket based facilities.
• Linux pipes are much easier to write for. Win32 pipes are difficult to use in a C program and subtle programming errors can cause many problems in unrelated modules.

As is often the case, Microsoft just threw something together and called it "infrastructure." Linux developers drew on 25 years of UNIX evolution and experience, and made a better product as a result.

-sting3r

The Minority View

[TopShelf]

I don't use Linux - and I've been a regular /.er for years. Comparisons like this are interesting, as the previous poster noted - MS spends zillion$ to get their word out, so I see nothing wrong with posting alternative viewpoints here...