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Early Speed Tests For Windows 8
adeelarshad82 writes "You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process. That bodes well for Windows 8, considering at the early stage of Developer Preview—even before we've seen an actual beta—the nascent operating system is getting widespread praise for its performance, particularly in startup times. Anecdotal evidence is always encouraging, but PCMag decided to run some very early tests on the OS to see if the reports were wishful thinking or if there was a real, measurable boost in speed. Along with startup and shutdown times, they used several standard industry benchmarks to compare Windows 8 performance with that of Windows 7 running on the same machine."
OF COURSE the test build of Windows 8 runs wickedly quick. Can't you read? It's an early Developer Preview, it's not even a beta yet. They haven't packed it full of the standard train-load of unnecessary services, buggy features, assorted DRM layers, and other miscellaneous bling, crapware, and patented Microsoft Goodness. And by god when it ships, it better have touch-screen enabled by defaultâ¦
All I can say is Windows has gone straight downhill since Clippy and Bob registered their domestic partnership and retired to Venice Beach.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There are actually two kind of performances, which are both important. The real, actual performance, and how well the OS can make the system feel even under load. It's important to have a snappy feel even if the system underneath is working hard, and this is especially true now that the amount of cores in CPUs and multithreading are increasing. Say what you want, but just the feel of speediness is an important factor. This is why the boot up time is looked at so much too - it's great to quickly get to the desktop, and let the OS load up while you're already started working.
One thing I've noticed with boot up times (and this applies to all operating systems) is that the OS tries to load all programs at once. Usually the limiting factor to this will be hard drive. It's less true with SSD drives, but it's really noticeable with 7200 RPM and slower drives. It usually leads to the whole system crawling for a few minutes after desktop shows up. It would be great if the OS would measure the different loads and UI response times, and actually limit the startup programs. This way you could open your browser and other tools and those would be given priority upon startup process.
I tested the developer preview version briefly and it sure seemed a lot faster and snappier. The startup time is remarkably faster. And according to this PCMag test, seems like the overall speed has been improved a lot too. Good job MS!
If performance optimization is one of the last steps in the process than I wouldn't expect much from it. Without the ability to re-engineer major sections of code, not something anyone would be willing to do at the end of the process, there won't be more than minor improvements.
This leaves out of the picture that clean installs of any OS are going to be rather fast to start and shutdown, the issues begin when installations get bogged down.
I would have compared the boot-time of Linux to this, but they never state what harddrive they're using, rendering any compare worthless.
...on second thought, let's just compare that against my 1.8Ghz Core2Duo, 2GiB RAM Notebook: Debian Wheezy needs 4 seconds to boot. :O
From the article
Benchmark Windows 7 Windows 8 Percent improvement
Startup time (min:sec) 1:32 0:32 +65
Shutdown Time 10 11 -10
Old hobbits die hard.
Not necessarily. It wouldn't be the first time things have been performance tuned before they're actually working properly.
I heard the opposite.
Does anyone else detect a whiff of shill in the air?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By "standard industry benchmarks", the summary means "benchmarks commonly used in tech magazines and blogs".
The startup time should be faster if you used suspend instead of shutdown, Fedora 15 on my machine with 2GiB RAM, 7200rpm SATA 2 drives and i3 CPU @ 2.93 GHZ, starts back up to a desktop very quickly indeed, But I agree once they load it down with all of the services and other crap that Windows comes with then it will be slower than in these tests. And I did read the article.
Hopefully the Windows classic interface is an option.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
...you boot the bastard on a desktop machine, and then it goes to that horrid Metro screen which makes navigating with a mouse and keyboard painful? It may be fine for touch, but without touch, man....it makes you want to break things.
Then you talk to a Microsoft turfer, as seen on here and other places, they will bald-faced lie to you and say "well, it's not finished yet, who knows what it will be like?"
Then you go to the Microsoft fora and ask Microsoft employees about Metro as being standard for the upcoming desktop, they double-down on it.
Guys, get your friggin' stories straight. All I know for sure is that Metro without touch is a steaming load of bovine excrement backlit by the morning sun so you can see the vapors wafting off it. Fix it.
--
BMO
More than half a minute including BIOS boot, which according to the article is 15 seconds.
surely we should bne thinking about time to be usuable once logged in? We all know Windows doesn't start alot of things till after user login (first used in NT4), so this is what we should be measuring, not how quick it gets to login screen. Reading the article they COULD be using this test but it's not clear.
Also things like with WIndows you NEED some sort of anti-virus installed as well so again not that real world, but looking encouraging and we'll see how many of the extra features not yet implemented impact this.
I wish the test was done with a weaker machine. I guess the gap is achieved by a better usage of higher HW/FW which will not be noticeable in a non-quad-core machine.
You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process.
No you don't, not among sane people. You don't do performance optimization as "one of the last steps" shortly before shipping.
What you hear is that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" (quoting Donald Knuth). What he meant is that you should not bother with complicated performance optimizations when designing the code. Rather, create and implement a good clean design, then test performance and optimize where needed. On the other hand, algorithm choice is one of the biggest performance contributors and initial choices will often be made quite early, so one cannot apply this quote blindly. Read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Startup time, until login screen, or desktop, or usable system, or fully usable system ....?
The four are different and most people assume you mean the last, when most are measured to the first .... ...and unless you have a laptop why are you turning the machine on and off enough to worry about boot times (in the real world the difference between 20s and 1 minutes is a vast gulf, the difference between 1 minute and 5 minutes is irrelevant)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Ideally, a modern desktop OS should be booted once. The rest of the time it should be slipping in and out of sleep.
In practice it seems that a few months between reboots (for OS updates) is easily attainable on some platforms.
When a reboot occurs once every few months, boot time is not terribly important.
I can't help but think that people who marvel at improved boot times are rebooting their machines too much.
Am I the only one that doesn't care about startup times? My debian servers only need to be rebooted for a kernel upgrade. For how infrequently I need to restart, startup times are a minor issue.
I can't say the same for Windows, which requires a restart on half the Microsoft Updates that are installed, many software installations, and of course crashes.
That may be true for servers, but desktop users will shutdown any OS.
What burns my shorts these days is not the Windows reboot.
It's the automatic updates that only get applied at the end. "PLEASE PLEASE OH PLEASE DON'T TURN ME OFF BECAUSE I WILL FUCK YOUR COMPUTER IF YOU TURN ME OFF IN THE MIDDLE OF UPDATES"
For 20 minutes.
--
BMO
Yah, I can't say that I care much about start-up times: $ uptime 18:02:25 up 724 days, 5:08, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Zero power consumption with session written to disk, little power consumption with suspend to ram. No need to shut down. Desktop users just need to be educated.
Figures, I just started using Win7 now the talks are of Win8.
XP 64bit has been good to me. I was forced to run Win7
as "Battle Field 3" requires DX11. I still only boot into
Win7 when playing BF3.
I've always assumed the next Windows OS was going to be a
touch screen. Don't know why it comes as a surprise.
Remember the roll out for Surface?
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx
I figure parts-n-pieces will surface [shrug] in Win8.
Kind of a lopsided review; a 3.4GHz quad-core PC with 4GB RAM
Got the power, just no Ram.
and slices of swiss cheese fly through the air and hit the wall much faster than plastic-wrapped preprocessed cheese because of all the holes
About year ago, I tuned my linux box (cheap single-core Intel Atom board, 5400rpm HDD, 1GB RAM) to boot into X in 8s (measured between hitting ENTER key and displaying search results for "asdf" on google in Opera browser). Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE_QRZwNGOs
Spoken like a true Windows shill.
My personal experince is that Windows is fragile during updates. YMMV, but I have learned the hard way not to fuck with Windows updating itself or shutting it off while it's doing something "important." Many other people have been conditioned over the years by the exact same things.
I don't care if you say the beach is safe to surf, Kilgore. I don't trust you and nor do I trust Windows.
>Comparing Windows and Linux updates
There is no comparison. Package managers for Linux are quite robust and will pick up exactly where you left off if you so much as hit control-C and then restart. Powering down in the middle would likely fuck /something/ temporarily, but unless you're doing a kernel update, there is likely no reason for a machine to be unbootable. And even then there are the backup kernels you can pick on boot from the handy-dandy boot screen.
>Losing power during write, forcing a fsck
>taking a long time
I haven't had a fsck take longer than a minute since I went to a journaling file system last century, and journaling file systems on Linux are standard issue now. I also noticed when I did an install of Ubuntu 11.10 that btrfs is available. This is spectacular, but I'm sticking with ext4 for now because it's thoroughly debugged and I can trust it.
Sorry to break it to you, shill, but you're full of hot air and you need a tic-tac.
--
BMO
SOTP TEH PRESSAS!
Now, how does it compare to the 2012 Toyota Avalon?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Try: sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a
At least that's always worked for me when I need it to, should power fail, etc. Not to mention ext3/ext4 journaling seems much nicer than using NTFS and having to fallback to CHKDSK when such issues arise, (along with the occasional pre-emptive NTFS defrag).
Personally I find the overall cost of Windows as being too costly to use in my business.
man page for dpkg-reconfigure
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
It would be a waste of money to upgrade to the new product, who the hell cares 1 minute more for booting up, and just a bunch of points of advantage in some benchmarks. I'd like to know ram occupation, IO statistics, things like this.
What a useless article, PCMag!
Making Windows more optimal might signal a turn of focus toward phones and tablets.
well considering this is version 8... i'd be expecting this to be right near the end of the line and pretty well fully optimized
Nice, but how many minutes to determine what to show as copying time when copying several gigs to another drive?
It's the automatic updates that only get applied at the end.
You can apply OS updates on Windows without requiring a server reboot since about 2003. You could in-theory apply a patch manually since 1993 on NT. The only reason Windows requires a reboot is so that applications that otherwise would keep on running with a vulnerable/buggy shared library loaded in memory are now forced to restart with the fresh new version. Some services/programs are only started and stopped at bootup making a reboot the only way to get them to use the patched version. With ASLR there is no easy solution to patch in-memory shared libraries. No OS does this AFAIK. Windows forces you to reboot while Linux just lets you keep running with vulnerabilities still unpatched till you restart. What a win for Linux!
I'm sorry this simple principle is so confusing for non-technical people like you. But hey for anti-ms trolls like you ignorance is probably a virtue...
I rarely shutdown or startup - only when there are Windows updates. It takes between 5 and 10 seconds to get a working PC from pressing the power button. So why is startup a valid / significant test? SLEEP is the way forward here
And in the UK its not cheap so yes, I shut my desktop down when I'm not using it and fully switch off the monitor. Aside from that it has an enviromental benefit downstream at the power station. Sleep mode might not use much power but it still uses some and with all the computers in the world that probably adds up to a lot of CO2 for nothing.
FTA:
Long story short:
unless the code takes a turn for the worse in the
next year or so, we can look forward to some
speedier computing once Windows 8 is released.
Windows XP was insanely fast at launch. Then they fixed the security holes/shortcuts in programming and it slowed down quite a bit.
If I remember correctly, the Windows 7 beta performed considerably faster than either the RC or finally the RTM. Windows 8 could actually get slower as development progresses.
"Old hobbits die hard."
Was he taking Viagra?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Well, then jeeze, for fuck's sake, turn auto update off, problem solved.
Provided that Windows can/may download updates during the active session (when the user is actually using his computer),
how come actual updates take so long, while the OS is in mono-task mode, pending for a complete halt, with no user operation in the way?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If it is a desktop, just walk away. If it is a laptop, your battery should last long enough to do the update, so you can just take it with you. What I REALLY hate is going for coffee while waiting for a logon screen, and then you have to wait 2 minutes AGAIN before it becomes stable. Why can't it preload all the important files if it becomes idle while waiting for a logon?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
One word: laptops. Sleep mode still uses power. Hibernate can work, though it usually takes a while anyway. I rarely turn off my Windows machine because it wants to restart.
wake me up when they'll compare it to windows xp
Believing these comparisons, Windows 8 should be able to boot in 2 seconds on a 386 with 4 MB RAM.
They've been saying the new version is faster than the old one, at least since Windows 95 was much faster than Windows 3.11.
You are an idiot. NTFS has always had journaling. And it's always been broken. Why do you think there are volumes of documentation for MS SQL Server talking about the differences in behaviour and reliability between write-back and write-through caching controllers.
Thanks for posting from a parallel universe. Could you please upload that magical version of the software you are using somewhere where the guys from Redmond can find it? Thanks.
In return we can send you versions of unix from the 1980s onward that can stop and start just about anything at any time. Our version of Microsoft even had a quite decent version called Xenix that could do that sort of thing.
Give Microsoft time to stick some horribly designed bells and whistles on to destroy any performance gains you're seeing now.
Actually, they shouldn't be including the BIOS time into the boot time because that has nothing to do with the OS.
It should read more like
Benchmark Windows 7 Windows 8 Percent improvement
Startup time (min:sec) 1:17 0:17 +78
78% improvement
All hail stallman!
All hail stallman!
Christ, you're utterly deluded.
Unfinished products should cater to each user's every need, including the need to be so retarded as to not know how to uninstall a browser and so autistic as to not stand half a second of start menu!
But then again, I'm a shill, and you're hired by Stallman, because people who like what I don't like don't exist!
Yah, I can't say that I care much about start-up times
Me neither : uptime 07:55:31 up 1532 days, 18:50, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 :)
I must confess that I'm a little behind on kernel updates
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
So.. you mean it was in suspend and woke up tongue X screen in 8 seconds? My laptop does that faster. Unless you meant it was completely powered down, nothing store in RAM, etc and you pushed the power on button (which may double as an enter key, I have no clue)
It was clean boot, no suspend. By ENTER I meant enter in grub menu.
Au contraire, the BIOS time *must* be included because it has become one of, if not *the*, biggest contributor to boot times as efforts such as this reduce the boot time of the OS. Note: faster boot times are definitely possible (see coreboot http://www.coreboot.org/). Since all modern operating systems initialize their own hardware anyway, why do we need so much cruft in the BIOS? (I had hoped that UEFI would be better but it is not. At least on the systems I have used. If anything, boot times have gotten *longer* not shorter.)
As for why boot time matters, here is an angle that I haven't heard discussed yet: most software requires you to reboot after installation or update (even though the only things that should require a reboot are the OS kernel and possibly hardware drivers). With as much software as is typically on a machine and with the number of security vulnerabilities being discovered in said software, it seems like we are always rebooting. It wouldn't bother me as much if reboots were faster* but current slow reboot times are extremely disruptive as they are long enough that they force one "out of the flow."
*Note: the other thing that keeps this from being realistic is that the OS and software package do not keep track of their state very well. Why can't all software do as many of the current web browsers do and remember their state so they can come back up exactly where they were if they are suddenly or even gracefully shut down?
-Anon
It spends a lot of its time doing transactions to make sure it can roll-back any changes in the case of failure. Also, being changes to system files, you have to serially modify/patch because you don't want to chance a race condition and fubar the system files.
I suspect that it is all the redundant code used in Windows, where the same fix has to be applied in 20,000 places across the OS. You also have the insane complexity of the registry, and that is where the problems come from when it comes to updates. I suspect that Microsoft does not use a lot of shared library calls, and there is a lack of anyone looking over the code to see where multiple functions could be consolidated down into a single function.
Then again, things like .NET are not small, so the time it takes to copy the files into place and update the registry will take a bit of time with a regular hard drive.
Even with a laptop, I mostly use hibernate. Amount of time to come out of hibernate, even on Windows 7 is only about 20 seconds after BIOS. And that gives you fully usable system, with all the programs you had open previously. Reboot time is absolutely worthless, because I almost never reboot anymore. Once every couple of weeks for updates.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Why can't all software do as many of the current web browsers do and remember their state so they can come back up exactly where they were if they are suddenly or even gracefully shut down?
Indeed. There should be some kind of operating system service which could automatically restart any application which were running when the system was shut down. Perhaps it could even interact with them and restore their state such as documents and cursor positions? Oh wait: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373524(VS.85).aspx
The restart manager - if used by the application or service - will actually keep track of files which have been scheduled for updating (new version) during restart. If the files are being kept open by an application or service which has registered with Restart Manager, RM can restart the application and avoid a system restart. Note, this replace is transactional - it only replaces a set of files when all files can be closed by restarting processes.
If the processes are closed for some other reason and RM suddenly finds that all the files in a replace set now can be safely replaced, it will proceed to do so. Have you ever noticed that the start menu says that you should restart to install update, only later to find that this notification has mysteriously been removed again? That's Restart Manager jumping in a replacing files.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
...not a great idea for an OS that is a malware magnet.
Plus you just placed another burden on the n00b user. They have to figure out what you just told them to do.
Updates in both MacOS and Windows are far too disruptive for systems released in this day and age.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Speed tests without a lot of applications installed are irrelevant.
How about when it decides to force a restart of your computer, and It's Just Too Bad you were in the middle of a fullscreen application that hid the restart notification until the timer expired and your application was force quit on the way to update-land?
Yeah, I'll reboot at the end of the day, if you ask politely like Linux does.
I'm running a board with UEFI and I couldn't agree more. I have about 20 seconds from press the power switch til I see the Windows 7 start screen. Which then shows the desktop and is usable in about 14 or so seconds thanks to the SSD.
One thing I did notice is that my older laptop I have for work has a BIOS that only take around 3-4 seconds. Now I understand that laptops have set hardware so they don't need to do a lot of checks to load other things, but isn't UEFI supposed to be modular? Why not allow a configuration to be set and the machine just tries automatically starting with that unless the user enters the configuration screen to change settings. Or am I just wrong and the different between the desktop and laptop is that the desktop has three different SATA/eSATA controllers in it and their ROMs take forever to initialize while the laptop has only a single controller since they mainly have a max of three devices on them.
Sorry to break it to you, shill, but you're full of hot air and you need a tic-tac.
But to balance it out, everything in your post was wrong.
What blows me away and maybe windows 8 FINALLY fixes this. It the dreaded path length problems we have all encountered doing things like zipping and unzipping files.
You would THINK that path length issues would be a thing of the past at this point...
Well. Windows cannot go months between reboots because you have to reboot the damn thing everytime microsoft issues any kind of major patch. It's ridiculous. As far as time between reboots, real OSes (viz. VMS) can stay up for YEARS without the need for reboot. Why should windows be any ... because microsoft does not have the engineering talent to write a decent OS. And as far as the UI is concerned, ...
different? Well, we all know why
well, that's another complete sad story unto itself
Journalling file systems are good, but ones that support true transactions (with atomic commit or clean rollback) are even better. Which is precisely what NTFS does, and what Windows uses to install updates - so no, it's not "fragile" during updates. Unless you're still on XP.
Just wait to install updates, service packs, .NET frameworks (or their future equivalent), etc, etc... A fresh XP installation books in less than 20 seconds on my machine, more like 15. Install updates, drivers, .NET frameworks...
And it's nearly 2 minutes on my, relatively lean, machine (nothing in startup), with decent modern hardware (Intel 9550 Quado Core CPU, 4 GB RAM, 10K RPM hard disk). That's all the way past the login process until I can USE the machine. This thing should fly. Ubuntu loads in 30 seconds, fully ready to be used.
You mad? You mad.
I don't expect any OS to be able to boot the kernel, start the GUI, and lauch all my services with any great speed. I have DB/2 UDB, Oracle 11g, PostgreSQL 8.4, MySQL 5.5, SQL Server, and Glassfish all firing up when the box is booted. It takes 15-20 minutes, and switching to Linux won't improve that.
Competitions over boot time are only relevant to people who just use their system as a client.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
... one little bit how fast it is. The interface is fundamentally crap. Performance is irrelevant when functionality is not up to par. I can do 200km/h in my car if I drive it off a cliff but the steering is then somewhat degraded :-) I liken Metro to Unity, otherwise known as the Win ME of the Linux world.
When measuring how much faster *Windows* is at booting, you shouldn't include the BIOS times as they do not reflect Windows at all. MS showed a laptop booting in 4-5 seconds.. TOTAL. The graphics wasn't able to switch from low-res BIOS to high-res login in the time it took to boot Windows.
A car analogy. I'm going to measure your 1/4 mile times by including the time it took for you to drive from home to the track.
Try this experiment if you have the resources available. Before you start bitching about "It's XP, it's old and busted, and who cares about it?", note that I'm trying to make a point, not advocate its use.
Install Windows XP, any version before SP3. Keep the system plain-Jane: don't make any customizations to it at all. Test how fast it starts up, performs various functions, etc. Next, install SP3 and do the same.
I've installed XP on hundreds of systems, personal and corporate. The one thing I've consistently seen since SP2 is that performance took a massive hit across the board once SP2 or SP3 was installed.
Now consider how fast people said Vista was when it came out. Also consider how fast people said Win7 was when it came out.
Don't you think it would be in Microsoft's best interest if they were to slow down various aspects of previous operating systems before the new one comes out so that benchmarks will look great? Obviously, they won't make on sweeping change that would be obvious to folks like /. readers, but changes made over time would add up.
My personal belief is that it's a rigged system. I think Microsoft is 'salting' the system, intentionally slowing down previous OSs so that newer releases will seem to perform better.
A good test would be to do an install of XP, Vista, Win7, and Win8 without any applicable service packs, do some benchmarking, then see what you get.
"Along with startup and shutdown times, they used several standard industry benchmarks to compare Windows 8 performance with that of Windows 7 running on the same machine".
...
But not any other OS and not without Microsoft deciding the criteria
Worked for me.
XP SP3 + nLite = what do you need more ?
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Whatever you say, shill.
--
BMO
So instead of the OS forcing a reboot the sane way you shift the blame to the naive users who may or may not restart applications and services depending on what kind of confusing dialog the open source idiots come up with this time. Blame the users. Brilliant strategy. Although, its hard to think logically with a defective brain that you have so I feel kinda sorry for you now.. aww :(
You appear to have attached some text to a post that has nothing to do with it. Please find the correct post and try again.
In other word - NO I did not suggest anything remotely of the sort. I would also suggest that you learn a little bit of the simple details of how non MSDOS computer systems work (for example NT) before advancing such opinions that are so incorrect that I jokingly suggested they do not belong in this reality. You don't have to reboot for a minor change anymore. Suggesting otherwise is irresponsible unless it's a single user computer and nobody apart from you is going to care if it's on or off.
Using Win 7 i notice that my desktop is NOT immediately usable. But, the problem is clearly that many of the files and folders I access first are on network drives that are painfully slow to load in windows. The files are stored and served off of oracle mainframes.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.