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Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by andai on Monday November 18, 2024 @06:50AM (#42171616)
>filesystem is a lot better

In my tests it was 6-7x slower than on Linux (in VirtualBox on Windows). I assume by better you mean more features?

On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code.

Granted it doesn't take much time but there's this recurring thing of "my computer being forced to do things I do not want it to do."

I also — and this is my favorite, or perhaps least favorite one — ran Windows XP inside VirtualBox (on Windows 10). When you press Win+E in XP, an Explorer window is shown to you. It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay. Meanwhile on the host OS (10), there is about half a second of delay, at which point a window is drawn, but then you can enjoy a little old school powerpoint animation as you watch each UI control being painted one by one.

(Don't get me started on the start menu!)

Twenty years of progress!

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by jraph on Monday November 18, 2024 @07:36AM (#42171830)
> I assume by better you mean more features?

I would guess better on current Windows than on Windows 95. I don't know about faster, but NTFS is most probably more reliable than FAT32. And also more features of course, and fewer limitations. At least the file size limit (4 Gb) and ownership / rights metadata (ACL).

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by PaulHoule on Monday November 18, 2024 @07:56AM (#42171926)
Depends how you use it.

If you are handling a stupendous number of small files (say doing an npm build) then metadata operations are terribly expensive on Windows because it is expensive to look up security credentials.

Maven is not too different from npm in how it works except instead of installing 70,000 small files it installs 70 moderate sized JAR files that are really ZIP files that encase the little files. It works better in Windows than npm. Npm got popular and they had to face down the problem that people would try building the Linux kernel under WSL and get awful times.

Microsoft knows it has to win the hearts and minds of developers and they believe in JS, TS and Visual Studio code so they’ve tried all sorts of half-baked things to speed up file I/O for developers.

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by akx on Monday November 18, 2024 @08:41AM (#42172197)
No filesystem is great in the lots-of-small-files case, partly simply due to syscall overhead.

There's a reason https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html , SquashFS, etc. are a thing, or why even Europe's fastestest supercomputer's admins admonish against lots of small files. https://docs.lumi-supercomputer.eu/storage/#about-the-number...

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by whoknw on Monday November 18, 2024 @11:25AM (#42173942)
The reason LUMI is advising against many files is that it uses the Lustre parallel filesystem, which is notoriously bad with small files. See here: https://www.lanl.gov/projects/national-security-education-ce... .
Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by red_admiral on Monday November 18, 2024 @08:48AM (#42172253)
I guess that's where the "sqlite competes with fopen" part might help.
Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by mech422 on Monday November 18, 2024 @03:16PM (#42176439)
That used to be ReiserFS's claim to fame - tail packing small files. Doesn't seem like any FS has really optimized small file handling since then.
Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by PaulHoule on Monday November 18, 2024 @04:52PM (#42177502)
It is not so much the wasted space that bugs me as all the metadata and processing of that metadata.

For instance, the 70,000 files in your node_modules do not need separate owner and group fields (they all belong to the same user under normal conditions) and are all +rw for the files and +rwx for the directories. If you have access to one you have access to all and if your OS is access checking each file you are paying in terms of battery life, time, etc.

On Windows it is the same story except the access control system is much more complex and is slower. (I hope that Linux is not wasting a lot of time processing the POSIX ACLs you aren’t using!)

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by account42 on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @04:35AM (#42181557)
SquashFS is a (read only) filesystem designed for small files.

Which shows that even if you don't want to call any filesystem great here, they differ vastly in just how bad they handle small files. Windows' filesystems (and more importantly it's virtual filesystem layer including filters) are on the extremely slow end of this spectrum.

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by EasyMark on Monday November 18, 2024 @05:14PM (#42177699)
As someone who has done some fairly extensive reboot testing of “power failures” for fat32 and ntfs I can guarantee you that NTFS is far more robust but it’s not bullet proof
Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by hulitu on Monday November 18, 2024 @07:06AM (#42171686)
> Twenty years of progress!

Well, it does have more ports normally open and starts connecting to MS as soon as possible, so yes, it is a progress. /s

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by heraldgeezer on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:11AM (#42172406)
>On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code.

You were probably using Sysinternals process monitor. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

Windows does a tonne of things in the background, yes. If I run that and let it monitor everything, things will happen even if I do nothing. It is an OS and complex.

>It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay

THIS is true and also crazy to me. I forgot how fast XP was. Especially on modern hardware. I TeamViewer into a laptop with an i5 CPU and Windows XP (medical clients...) and it felt faster than my more powerful local machine!!

I have set my sysdm.cpl performance settings to this, and it does help a bit to get rid of the animations and crap.

https://imgur.com/a/jlre36e

Yea... I like the 10 start menu but they destroyed it in 11...

Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by andai on Monday November 18, 2024 @11:17AM (#42173846)
And it was considered bloated at the time!
Re:Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? by dusted on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:31AM (#42172567)
Oh, i meant that ntfs is a lot better than fat16/32. I mainly use linux, and I like ext4 and love zfs, but ntfs is also reasonably stable.