On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 06:34:49PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
People seem to forget that the performance of Linux was a hard won battle over time rather than due to any amazing technical architecture.
It's also not over :-) It works well because of lots of little pieces that have been hammered together well. A lot of stuff gets sped up in Linux because people get annoyed when it is slow. I almost wonder if there isn't often a disconnect between the people who work on kernels and the people who end up having to use them. Way back when, folks at BSD did a lot of measurement and analysis of typical system usage when they came up with FFS, and the VFS layers. Somehow, this knowledge seems to have gotten lost in OSX. It might have some wonderful features, but a fast filesystem certainly is not one of them. People porting 'git' to OSX are discovering that the OS just takes a long time to stat all of the files in a tree (something you need to do to figure out if they've changed). Windows is thousands of times slower at this, and it appears that so is OSX. Perhaps there is some unwritten rule that to be popular, an OS must have a poorly performing filesystem. David -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
