'Unix beats Windows' - says Microsoft!
Posted by Paul Murphy @ 4:13 am
Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux
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Ok, that headline may be a bit overblown - but Microsoft Research has released part of a report on the "Singularity" kernel they’ve been working on as part of their planned shift to network computing. The report includes some performance comparisons that show Singularity beating everything else on a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon-based machine.
What’s noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants.
For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to "create and start a process" as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP. Similarly they provide four graphs comparing raw disk I/O and show the Unix variants beating Windows/XP in three (and a half) of the four cases.
Oddly, however, it’s the cases in which they report Windows/XP as beating Unix that are the most interesting. There are three examples of this: one in which they count the CPU cycles needed for a "thread yield" as 911 for FreeBSD, 906 for Linux, and 753 for Windows XP; one in which they count CPU cycles for a "2 thread wait-set ping pong" as 4,707 for FreeBSD, 4,041 for Linux, and 1,658 for Windows/XP; and, one in which they report that "for the sequential read operations, Windows XP performed significantly better than the other systems for block sizes less than 8 kilobytes."
So how did they get these results?
The sequential tests read or wrote 512MB of data from the same portion of the hard disk. The random read and write tests performed 1000 operations on the same sequences of blocks on the disk....