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:Too Telling

[Rei]

Actually, what I found most telling about Windows was (from the summary, not the article):

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."

5,376,000 cycles just to spawn a process? Dear YHVH, what the heck are they doing with that many cycles? Writing its biography? Waiting for the release of Duke Nukem Forever? usleep(5375000000000)?

It is kind of amusing, however, to see Microsoft (which has constantly spun Windows as being faster than Unix) admit how poorly it performs.

Re:That explains a lot

[the grand asdfer]

Umm, on my Mac (10.4.3) I can simulaneously unzip a 50 Mb file while ripping an audio CD w/iTunes and be we browsing and not skip a beat. Oh wait, that's right, Mac OS is based on Unix now...