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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

A lot of low level stuff is a lot slower on Windows, let alone the GUI. There's also entire blogs cataloging an abundance of pathological performance issues.

The one I notice the most is the filesystem. Running Linux in VirtualBox, I got 7x the host speed for many small file operations. (On top of that Explorer itself has its own random lag.)

I think a better question is how much performance are they leaving on the table by bloating the OS so much. Like they could have just not touched Explorer for 20 years and it would be 10x snappier now.

I think the number is closer to 100x actually. Explorer on XP opens (fully rendered) after a single video frame... also while running virtualized inside Win10.

Meanwhile Win10 Explorer opens after a noticeable delay, and then spends the next several hundred milliseconds painting the UI elements one by one...

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> The one I notice the most is the filesystem.

This is due to the extensible file system filter model in place; I'm not aware of another OS that implements this feature and is primarily used for antivirus, but can be used by any developer for any purpose.

It applies to all file systems on Windows.

DevDrive[0] is Microsoft's current solution to this.

> Meanwhile Win10 Explorer opens after a noticeable delay

This could be, again, largely due to 3rd party hooks (or 1st party software that doesn't ship with Windows) into Explorer.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/devdrive/

> I'm not aware of another OS that implements this feature

I'm not sure this is exactly what you mean, but Linux has inotify and all sorts of BPF hooks for filtering various syscalls, for example file operations.

FSFilters are basically a custom kernel module that can and will do anything they want on any filesystem access. (There's also network filters, which is how things like WinPcap get implemented.)

So yes, you could implement something similar in Linux, but there's not, last I looked, a prebuilt toolkit and infrastructure for them, just the generic interfaces you can use to hook anything.

(Compare the difference between writing a BPF module to hook all FS operations, and the limitations of eBPF, to having an InterceptFSCalls struct that you define in your custom kernel module to run your own arbitrary code on every access.)

I'm glad you mentioned that. I noticed when running "Hello world" C program on Windows 10 that Windows performs over 100 reads of the Registry before running the program. Same thing when I right click a file...

A few of those are 3rd party, but most are not.

Remember that Win32 process creation is expensive[0]. And on NT, processes don't run, threads do.

The strategy of applications, like olde-tymey Apache using multiple processes to handle incoming connections is fine on UN*X, but terrible on Windows.

[0] https://fourcore.io/blogs/how-a-windows-process-is-created-p...

> The one I notice the most is the filesystem

I’m not sure it’s the file system per se, I believe the main reason is the security model.

NT kernel has rather sophisticated security. The securable objects have security descriptors with many access control entries and auditing rules, which inherit over file system and other hierarchies according to some simple rules e.g. allow+deny=deny. Trustees are members of multiple security groups, and security groups can include other security groups so it’s not just a list, it’s a graph.

This makes access checks in NT relatively expensive. The kernel needs to perform access check every time a process creates or opens a file, that’s why CreateFile API function is relatively slow.

I've been trying to use auditing rules for a usage that seems completely in scope and obvious to prioritize from a security point of view (tracing access to EFS files and/or the keys allowing the access) and my conclusion was that you basically can't, the doc is garbage, the implementation is probably ad-hoc with lots of holes, and MS probably hasn't prioritised the maintenance of this feature since several decades (too busy adding ads in the start menu I guess)

The NT security descriptors are also so complex they are probably a little useless in practice too, because it's too hard to use correctly. On top of that the associated Win32 API is also too hard to use correctly to the point that I found an important bug in the usage model described in MSDN, meaning that the doc writer did not know how the function actually work (in tons of cases you probably don't hit this case, but if you start digging in all internal and external users, who knows what you could find...)

NT was full of good ideas but the execution is often quite poor.

From an NTFS auditing perspective, there’s no difference between auditing a non-EFS file or EFS file. Knowing that file auditing works just fine having done it many times, what makes you say it doesn’t work?

> The one I notice the most is the filesystem. Running Linux in VirtualBox, I got 7x the host speed for many small file operations. (On top of that Explorer itself has its own random lag.)

That’s a very old problem. In early days of subversion, the metadata for every directory existed in the directory. The rationale was that you could check out just a directory in svn. It was disastrously slow on Windows and the subversion maintainers had no answer for it, except insulting ones like “turn off virus scanning”. Telling a windows user to turn off virus scanning is equivalent to telling someone to play freeze tag in traffic. You might as well just tell them, “go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw”

Someone reorganized the data so it all happened at the root directory and the CLI just searched upward until it found the single metadata file. If memory serves that made large checkouts and updates about 2-3 times faster on Linux and 20x faster on windows.

None of this has to do with page size.

Death by 1000 cuts

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