Finally time to get a PC for SW developement.

[brucehoult]

The problem with Windows is slow task switching.

And task creation.

Which, incidentally, was exactly the same problem with VAX/VMS vs Unix 45 years ago.

VMS took several seconds to create a process for you when you logged in, and then every program you ran interactively was loaded in turn into the same process (bouncing back to the shell in between).

We had a Unix emulator called "Eunice" running under VMS. Like all Unixes it wanted to use a fresh process for every command. It cached VMS processes for you, so after a few minutes using it you'd have 2 or 3 or 4 processes owned by you.

V W
M N
S T

A nod is as good as a wink to a cutler fish.

[Jeroen3]

My experience is not valid on linux, this has a much better filesystem and I expect better caching.
Maybe it also triggers less anti-malware hooks than on windows.

The problem with Windows is slow task switching. Compilations which take seconds on Linux can take minutes on Windows. Same hardware, same project, same compiler. Compiling consists of running a whole bunch of tasks in sequence and parallel. Even on Linux you can get a further measureable improvement by tweaking task switching efficiency through kernel parameters.

This gets speed up a lot if you disable anti-malware.

Windows was not built around a zero-trust system. Hence processes can access waaaay to many things. This was later patched, but you still require anti-malware to check if files are known to be bad.
Microsoft is trying to get per-app-sandboxing mainstream, but I feel that's going to cost us even more ram.

[David Hess]

My experience is not valid on linux, this has a much better filesystem and I expect better caching.
Maybe it also triggers less anti-malware hooks than on windows.

The problem with Windows is slow task switching. Compilations which take seconds on Linux can take minutes on Windows. Same hardware, same project, same compiler. Compiling consists of running a whole bunch of tasks in sequence and parallel. Even on Linux you can get a further measureable improvement by tweaking task switching efficiency through kernel parameters.

I have read discussions where Linus Torvalds was asked about why some operating systems performed so poorly and it came down to things like task switching and file mapping not being properly implemented, presumably because they were not considered important and were just checklist items.  OSx and Windows were of course at the top of the list.

[nctnico]

My experience is not valid on linux, this has a much better filesystem and I expect better caching.
Maybe it also triggers less anti-malware hooks than on windows.

The problem with Windows is slow task switching. Compilations which take seconds on Linux can take minutes on Windows. Same hardware, same project, same compiler. Compiling consists of running a whole bunch of tasks in sequence and parallel. Even on Linux you can get a further measureable improvement by tweaking task switching efficiency through kernel parameters.

This gets speed up a lot if you disable anti-malware.

I already had that disabled. If you run a virus scanner along, things get even worse.

[BrianHG]

...
This gets speed up a lot if you disable anti-malware.

Windows was not built around a zero-trust system. Hence processes can access waaaay to many things. This was later patched, but you still require anti-malware to check if files are known to be bad.
Microsoft is trying to get per-app-sandboxing mainstream, but I feel that's going to cost us even more ram.

Yup, I caught Win11 anti-malware eating 50% of my system resources at one time when I just let the laptop sit.  I also once caught my laptop fans going insanely fast in 'Sleep' mode.  It not the laptop, its the stupid OS.  found a bunch of regs to edit.  For now, after my OS patches, the system for now works like a dream (or a nightmare from another angle) Like I said, I cannot wait to ditch Windows permanently...

[jfiresto]

VMS took several seconds to create a process for you when you logged in, and then every program you ran interactively was loaded in turn into the same process (bouncing back to the shell in between).

Ah, VMS, or Very Manly System as some used to call it, where emulating a single Unix open() statement could take half a page of code.

DEC tended to over-engineer their stuff.