Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is Windows so slow?

games.greggman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 159 posts

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#101

Post by CurtHagenlocher »

gillianseed wrote: post #95
hemancuso wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you back up calling it nonsense?

We've done compiler tests between VC express 2010 and GCC (Mingw gcc 4.6.x branch) at work with GCC beating VC express at '-O3 -ffast-math -march=corei7' vs '/O2 /arch:SSE2' for our code on Intel Core i7 nehalem. GCC even beat ICC on certain tests on that same Intel hardware. What we weren't able to compare between the compilers was link-time optimization and profile-guided optimization since Microsoft crippled VC ex…

So when you didn't use the two most important perf features in MSC, its performance was underwhelming. This is no surprise.

Also, if you were doing anything heavily floating-point, MSC 2010 would be a bad choice because it doesn't vectorize. Even internally at Microsoft, we were using ICC for building some math stuff. The next release of MSC fixes this.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#102

Post by WayneDB »

I run Windows 7 in Boot Camp every day and it easily outperforms OS X on the same exact hardware for most common tasks (browsing files, the web, starting up apps, etc).

The Windows desktop GUI system is more stable than anything else out there (meaning that it's not going to change drastically AND that it's a solid piece of software that just works) and it's as flexible as I need it to be, so that's why I stick with Windows. With virtual machines, WinSCP, Cygwin and other similar utilities, I have all the access to *nix that I need.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#103

Post by hkarthik »

_3u10 wrote: post #38
evmar wrote: post #10

I don't know this poster, but I am pretty familiar with the problem he's encountering, as I am the person most responsible for the Chrome build for Linux. I (and others) have put a lot of effort into making the Linux Chrome build fast. Some examples are multiple new implementations of the build system ( http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... ), experimentation with the gold linker (e.g. measu…

You can build almost any Visual Studio project with out using visual studio at all. Visual Studio project files are also MSBuild files. I've setup lots of build machines sans Visual Studio, projects build just fine with out it. MSBuild does suck in that there is little implicit parallelism, but you can hack around it. I have a feeling that the Windows build slowness probably comes from that lack of parallelism in msb…

Regarding MSBuild, the biggest problem I had with it is that if you built projects with Visual Studio, using most of the standard tooling for adding references and dependencies, you'd often be left with a project that built fine with Visual Studio, but had errors with MSBuild.

The reverse, incidentally, was usually okay. If you could build it with MSBuild, it usually worked in Visual Studio unless you used a lot of custom tasks to move files around.

I personally believe the fact that Visual Studio is all but required to build on Windows is one of the single most common reasons you don't see much OSS that is Windows friendly aside from those that are Java based.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#104

Post by gillianseed »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #101
gillianseed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've done compiler tests between VC express 2010 and GCC (Mingw gcc 4.6.x branch) at work with GCC beating VC express at '-O3 -ffast-math -march=corei7' vs '/O2 /arch:SSE2' for our code on Intel Core i7 nehalem. GCC even beat ICC on certain tests on that same Intel hardware. What we weren't able to compare between the compilers was link-time optimization and profile-guided optimization since Microsoft crippled VC ex…

So when you didn't use the two most important perf features in MSC, its performance was underwhelming. This is no surprise. Also, if you were doing anything heavily floating-point, MSC 2010 would be a bad choice because it doesn't vectorize. Even internally at Microsoft, we were using ICC for building some math stuff. The next release of MSC fixes this.

Well we obviously didn't enable PGO/LTO for GCC either when doing these tests as that would have been pointless.

It would have been interesting to compare the quality of the respective compiler's PGO/LTO optimizations (particularly PGO given that for GCC and ICC code is sometimes up to 20% faster with that optimization) but not interesting enough for us to purchase a Visual Studio licence.

And yes we use floating point math in most of our code, and if MSC doesn't vectorize then that would certainly explain worse performance. However this further denies the blanket statement of 'VC++ generates significantly better code than GCC.' which I was responding to.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#105

Post by 16s »

dagw wrote: post #86
viraptor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter during development though? You could always develop on GNU toolchain and then make a final build in VC once the feature code is complete.

Only if you are careful to only use the subset of the C++ spec supported by both compilers and avoid all gcc specific features.

In my experience, you don't have to be careful. I've written lot's of C++ that compile fine on Windows (using mingw/msys) or Linux/Mac using gcc. Can you provide an example of where gcc specific features are included w/o the developer explicitly doing so?

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#106

Post by idspispopd »

separate point:

while photoshop isn't on linux, there are plenty of replacements for that unless he's doing print work, which I don't think is the case, as photoshop isn't the beginning and end for print. (actually, TBH, photoshop is pretty shit for pixel work.)

Also maya is available for linux, autodesk just doesn't offer a free trial like they do with windows/mac os. (Including the 2012 edition.)

With no offence intended to the 3dsmax crew, as it has it's merits, but a sufficiently competent maya user won't find much use for 3dsmax.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#108

Post by jonhendry »

evmar wrote: post #10

I don't know this poster, but I am pretty familiar with the problem he's encountering, as I am the person most responsible for the Chrome build for Linux. I (and others) have put a lot of effort into making the Linux Chrome build fast. Some examples are multiple new implementations of the build system ( http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... ), experimentation with the gold linker (e.g. measu…

"Perhaps the difference is that when people write awesome tools for Windows or Mac they try to sell them rather than give them away."

Apple's switching from gcc to clang/llvm, and doing a lot of work on the latter, which is open source.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#109

Post by Impossible »

dagw wrote: post #86
viraptor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter during development though? You could always develop on GNU toolchain and then make a final build in VC once the feature code is complete.

Only if you are careful to only use the subset of the C++ spec supported by both compilers and avoid all gcc specific features.

This is pretty common and not particularly difficult. Most large cross-platform C++ projects (ie most browsers and game engines) compile in both gcc and msvc. It is easy to naively write code in one compiler that won't build in another, but it's also easy to fix said code once you try to build it with another compiler.

Re: Why is Windows so slow?

#110

Post by jonhendry »

hristov wrote: post #31

Interestingly enough Joel Spolsky mentioned something related to the directory listing problem more than 10 years ago. See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html In Joel's opinion it is an algorithm problem. He thinks that there is an O(n^2) algorithm in there somewhere causing trouble. And since one does not notice the O(n^2) unless there are hundreds of files in a directory it has not been fixed…

"Linux on the other hand benefits from the "many eyes" phenomenon of open source and when anyone smart enough notices slowness in Linux they can simply look in the code and find and remove any obviously slow algorithms."

More like Linux benefits from "many budgets and priorities". If someone at Microsoft spots an obviously slow algorithm, they may not be allowed to fix it, rather than working on whatever they're supposed to be working on, which probably doesn't include "fixing shipped, mature code that pretty much works in most cases."

On the Linux side, someone can decide it's really freakin' important to them to fix a slow bit, and there's little risk of it being a career-limiting move.

Post reply on HN