Windows Kernel Performance Relative to Other Operating Systems

May 14, 2013
miproconsulting
Blog

Pretty interesting information from an anonymous Microsoft developer over at Zorinaq:

I’m a developer in Windows and contribute to the NT kernel. (Proof: the SHA1 hash of revision #102 of [Edit: filename redacted] is [Edit: hash redacted].) I’m posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There’s almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world.

Granted, occasionally one sees naive people try to make things better. These people almost always fail. We can and do improve performance for specific scenarios that people with the ability to allocate resources believe impact business goals, but this work is Sisyphean. There’s no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business.

The entire post is fascinating, not only technically, but also in light of the incremental waning of Windows and subsequent upticks in Mac OS X and Linux in what were previously Win32 strongholds. Check it out.

(thx mjtsai)