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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."
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!
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."
...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.
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BMO
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
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.
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BMO