Why is Windows so slow?

Re:Why is Windows so slow? by prewett on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:07AM (#3369039)

I suspect it has something to do with NTFS updating access times by default. So every time you do anything with a file, it gets its access time updated (not modification time, access time). I don't have windows to test on, but you could try the suggestions [1][2] below.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940846(v=winembedd...

[2] http://oreilly.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html (#8)

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by RexRollman on Monday December 19, 2011 @06:26AM (#3369288)

The updating of last access time has been disabled since the release of Windows Vista (although you can turn it back on):

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2006/11/07/disabl...

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by lloeki on Monday December 19, 2011 @05:01AM (#3369139)

Mac OS X does appear to mount with atime but I happened to use this:

    $ cat /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.noatime.plist    
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
            "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
        <dict>
            <key>Label</key>
            <string>com.nullvision.noatime</string>
            <key>ProgramArguments</key>
            <array>
                <string>mount</string>
                <string>-vuwo</string>
                <string>noatime</string>
                <string>/</string>
            </array>
            <key>RunAtLoad</key>
            <true/>
        </dict>
    </plist>

I don't know if there's anything like relatime.

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by darklajid on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:32AM (#3369088)

As posted elsewhere and as someone pointed out in the very comments of the article: That doesn't seem to be the case for Windows 7 anymore.

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by shintoist on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:11AM (#3369044)

But most Linux distros do this by default as well. You have to mount with noatime to get rid of it.

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by wazoox on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:35AM (#3369099)

In fact nowadays most (all?) linux filesystems use relatime as default, which carries most of the advantages of both atime and noatime. See http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

I don't know if something similar exists under windows (I suppose it doesn't).

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Re:Why is Windows so slow? by kinetik on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:32AM (#3369092)

Linux has defaulted to relatime since 2009.

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