On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:03:04 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>>> unresponsive.
>>
>> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
>> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very
>> effectively/gracefully in some cases.
> 
> I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster
> than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it
> was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.

I don't think so - Linux deals with blocking I/O differently - though 
arguably, when the block device I/O buffers fill up, the system load does 
spike and the side effects aren't very pretty.

> Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's
> due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases
> is anybody's guess...

It's probably a little of both.

Jim

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