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Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks
twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."
Its ok, the article's first half is a bunch of benchmarks that are utterly meaningless on Windows anyway. Who cares if Window's takes twice as long to install as Linux? I mean seriously, I'm waiting. Are operating installs a frequent event? I can count on my hands and feet the number of times I've performed them.
Its all well and good that Ubuntu can install itself faster, but it doesn't matter, because it is by definition an infrequent workload. This is theoretically true for Ubuntu to. After all, wasn't the infinite in place upgradability something that has long been touted as a strength of Debian and co. Thats even more important with Ubuntu, because I sure as hell don't want to reinstall and OS every 6 months.
Same goes for startup and shutdown. Windows Vista was explicitly designed with the idea that in general, the OS is going to be suspended/hibernated, not rebooted. I'd be much more interested in seeing benchmarks of a comparison between the speed with which Windows and Ubuntu are able to hibernate/unhibernate. I've always been curious about this, as subjectively, an older Ubuntu installation hibernation seemed faster than in Windows. Alas, I guess in order to give us that benchmark, the reviewers would have to actually find hardware Linux could suspend on. How does one plot a hard lock on resume anyway, time for the system to reboot and come back up?
The other thing they failed to mention on the I/O benchmarking side is whether or not the drives were set to write cache mode or not in Windows. AFAIK the default for removable media to disable write caching in Windows, but to enable in Linux.
Oh, and why the !@#$ are they benchmarking compute intensive tasks in Python? Is it to exacerbate differences, because the chosen runtime is so absurdly slow? But, in reality, there is no reason for compute intensive tasks to vary on the same hardware. This test is highly dependent on the system services running and the python version. I would consider this more of a benchmark of python instead of Windows/Ubuntu.
Seriously, and if it takes more that 1 GB of my 500 GB hard drive then there's something wrong.
Why don't they benchmark some more important timings like how long it takes to shutdown, how long it takes to paste text in an email and how long it takes to run a disk defrag.
Boot-up/shut-down are there. I was focused on the Windows 7/x86 & Ubuntu 9.04/x86 'cuz that's what I run. Windows 7 boots about 13 seconds faster and takes about 4 seconds longer to shut down.
Disk I/O is there too. For moving large files around, the numbers were more-or-less comparable. For moving small files (probably comparable to running a disk defrag), Windows 7 got its ass handed to it. Hopefully Microsoft is aware of this and does something about it before subjecting users to it.
Everything took more than 1 GB of hard-drive space installed, but Windows was 3-4 times as big (7.9 GB rather than 2.3 GB).
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.