On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 11:41:32AM +0530, Parameshwara Bhat wrote: > > On my home computer and office computer, I have logged the time taken upto > logging in, it turns out that Ms windows(XP) is faster than Linux. On both > computers, dma is turned on.On my home computer, I have SUSE, Fedora and > Knoppix (debian) installed and on office computer, only Fedora. I have > measured with all the distros and while knoppix is faster of the distros, > still it doesn't measure upto Windows in speed. Both fedora and SUSE take > about one and a times longer time, evrything else remaining same. > > Any comments ? Or am I missing something ? You're missing a lot. #1 Windows simply throws up the GUI screen before the system has finished booting. not all your services are running yet, in some networked you can't even login despite the display of the login screen. Linux, as usual, is more honest. The GUI comes up AFTER everything else is running and the system is actually ready to work. #2 Linux boots up all the subsystems one at a time, waiting for each one to finish starting up before launching the next one. This can be fairly easily parallelized which dramatically reduces boot time. Why haven't most distro's done this ? see #3. #3 Pain - past Win systems have classically been fragile, bug ridden pieces of (deleted). In typical operation, (Not IT clean room setups), they crash frequently and the user has to endure waiting for the system to reboot before they can resume their work. This fact of life made it essential that MS do all they could to reduce that waiting time to more acceptable levels. Frankly, despite the fact that the Win boot up parallelizes its subsystems start ups, I'm not impressed with the result. Linux and UNIX, almost never crashing, have never had a need to improve in this area. (Granted, XP is less fragile than its predecessors, how nice, after only twenty years.) #4 If you truly want to see how fast a Linux system can boot start here: http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7172642614.html. This shows you how to parallelize the boot up process. Its a simple script modification. Be warned - its a classic "techie passion" approach. The first two thirds of the article is just a nice discussion of how the existing system boot up works. Look about two thirds of the way down the article for the section titled "Limitations of the traditional services framework" for the real meat. Read the first 2/3 for a good education on how a Linux system starts up! See ftp://www6.software.ibm.com/software/developer/library/l-boot/runlevel.zip for a samples of the scripts he uses. #5 A Red "Haring" : If you are truly interested in comparing the relative performance capabilities of Lin vs Win on the same hardware, you must look at something meaningful. That would be the real throughput time of an application actually running and being used in a real world fashion. The (apparent and illusory) speed of a boot up time is virtually meaningless. You might be interested in these lyrics from "The Who", "Won't get fooled again": Lines for XP/Gates: Meet the new boss Meet the new boss Same as the old boss Same as the old boss Lines for F/OSS: (all doublets as well) I'll tip my hat to the new constitution Take a bow for the new revolution Smile and grin at the change all around Pick up my guitar and play Just like yesterday Then I'll get on my knees and pray We don't get fooled again Don't get fooled again No, no! -- Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
