[wellylug] Linux vs Windows performance.

Pete Black pete at marchingcubes.com
Fri Aug 12 08:14:57 NZST 2005


On 11/08/2005, at 10:11 PM, Brent Wood wrote:
> Linux compiled with gcc, Windows with mingw. The two with lines 
> between the W &
> L points are dual boot laptops. So not just the same cpu, but the same 
> box.
>
> I know we all love Tux, but here he (she?) is about 3.5x faster than 
> Windows XP
> Pro. Is the mingw dll that inefficient? Is Windows really that bad?
>
> We will be looking further into this, with some models taking weeks to 
> run,
> performance gains will make a big difference.


Its hard to make any insights into exactly why the Windows version is 
not performing here without knowing a bit more about the code.

mingw32 is not hugely fast and especially on code that uses the C++ STL 
and presumably other C++ libraries, you can see some pretty dismal 
performance.

I certainly wouldn't blame the OS for being slow in this case, unless 
you can replicate the poor performance when you compile your software 
with a decent optimising compiler on Windows.

Certain techniques will naturally favour Linux over Windows, such as 
using large amounts of piped I/O and lots of separate processes - where 
Windows would fare better if the IPC model was based on threading, but 
for a straightforward data-crunching application, the compiler is going 
to be the big factor.


-Pete




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