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Explaining Disappointing XScale Performance In Pocket PCs
JYD writes: "I found this new article on a Pocket PC web site where Microsoft talks about why XScale Pocket PCs aren't as fast as people thought they would be. Is it the OS? The CPU not supporting ARM4 properly? I wonder if the Linux port would run faster on 400 Mhz ... or did Intel screw up the CPU?"
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Linux with KDE is slower than Windows 98 basically for two reasons. The first is that Linux does more stuff. For instance, it runs various daemons in the background to allow for remote access, it journals filesystem logs, it implements proper crash protection, it has a usable command line with virtual terminals etc. Windows 98 doesn't have these things, so it can be faster.
The second reason is that KDE is written largely in C++, and the Linux C++ linker is inefficient (it is much faster at C). The programs run fine, but they take longer to start up, which is what makes it "feel" slow. Gnome should in theory be faster, but they kill any speed increase they'd otherwise get by having a slower (well, in v1.4) graphics library and by using incredibly heavy things such as CORBA for ipc, and a daemon for configuration etc.
The reason other window managers (not just ancient ones, others such as WindowMaker or E) are faster is because a) they are simpler and b) tend to be written in C
The speed of GTK is improving, though CORBA/ORBit will always be slow on the gnome side imho. The Linux Linker issues with C++ are known about and are being resolved, which will lead to much better performance.
Another problem is that some modern distros are quite bloated. My SuSE 7.3 box loads all sorts of stuff at startup that I don't actually need, but I never got around to switching it off. Combined with the slow start of KDE and the fact it loads after login (which windows does before login), and it begins to feel slow.
Performance is improving, however it's still largely in the hands of the GNU folks and the distro companies.
thanks -mike
Most of the core ideas in Unix were developed in the 60's, actually.
Computing in the 50's was a very different thing, so limited that the idea of wasting cycles on things like memory management or protected memory would have been considered insane. It wasn't until hardware developed to the point where there were cycles and memory to spare that anything like Unix (or MULTICS, which is where most of Unix's ideas were developed) became possible.
himi
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