Microsoft Reports OSS Unix Beats Windows XP

Mortimer.CA writes "In a weblog entry, Paul Murphy mentions a Microsoft report (40 page PDF) that in many instances FreeBSD 5.3 and Linux perform better than Windows XP SP2. The report is about MS' Singularity kernel (which does perform better than the OSS kernels by many of the metrics they use), and some future directions in OS design (as well as examination of the way things have been done in the past)." From the post: "What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants. For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to "create and start a process" as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP."

Comments

Re:44 pages and the main question is still unanswe

[DavidTC]

Not really.

For example, apache and sshd, and various FTPds, can be restarted without anyone possibly noticing, because they simply leave any running children open. You connected before a certain time, you got the old copy, you connected after it, you got the new one.

And, of course, many protocols work fine if you go away for five seconds, like SMB. The client program will just say 'oops, connection hiccup' and reconnect silently, and the end user never notices. Same with IMAP clients. They go 'Hey, the server closed my connection, I better open it again'.

Restarting services on a Linux box is 99% transparent to end users, even ones that are currently directly doing something with the server.

Rebooting is not transparent, even if all the connections are reaqquired automatically, simply because work stopped for the two minute reboot.