Windows Vista's Speed Smarts

If you've ever waited for Windows XP to boot, you know that it can take a long time. Or maybe you've gotten into a situation where you're running several I/O bound applications, and the whole system seems to just stop, while your hard drive activity light is madly flickering.

Windows Vista is incorporating several technologies to improve performance in these situations. While there will be real performance increases—stuff will happen faster—Microsoft has put tremendous effort into improving responsiveness, so that the user also perceives that performance has improved.[/b]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558...2129TX1K0000532

ahem ahem....whatever technology they have put in may superficially increase responsiveness 😛. This is just like how XP seems to boot up faster but in reality you just get your desktop faster but your system isn't ready until all apps load and your task bar starts responding 😛

Even after those tricks XP takes hell lot of time to boot up for me...Anyone using Linux on Desktop? How much time does that take to boot up into desktop? I am using slackware as dual boot on my desktop, that boots up pretty fast. But I have not installed any GUI on linux. The servers that I have at work, take 30 - 120 mins to boot depending on number of processors and config, but thats a different story.

I use Fedora at home.It takes around 50sec-1min to boot, I have many services (like httpd) turned on at boot time. Other wise without these services , its about 40sec.Actually , in since i started using linux boot times dont really matter to me any more , I rarely ever restart my machine ..like once in 3-4 days 😛 .....so it doesnt matter.In windows I have had to reboot for all sorts of trivial reasons :angry: which really pissed me off., so boot times is a parameter there , but it dont matter in LinuxPS: These days I have a really strange problem in Win XP , when the message comes "Windows is starting up.." it stays exactly for 1 minute , before I get the login prompt( I have disabled the fancy login aka welcome screen) . No amount of tweaking services helped. I have clocked it, and it is exactly 1 min all the time , day in day out...really strange.

When my comp was relatively new, win xp pro used to boot up in under 25secs. Takes somethin like 40 secs now coz of all the programs and HDD wear n tear to an extent. XP home on the laptop boots up really quick though.Have only used the Ubuntu 5.10 live cd as far as linux goes. Takes forever to boot from the cd 😛

speed of live cd depends on condition of your optical drive.

P4 2.8C GHz HT Northwood 800MHz FSB 512KiB L2 cache, 256MB RAM 400MHz FSB, D865GBF motherboard, 120GB SATA 7200RPM boots up FC2 in about 30 seconds with lotsa services enabled. I can make the system boot in about ~15s if I disable the nonessential services...Netfreak what kinda servers do you have? Seems they are either heavily loaded or have slow disks or lotsa fast disks, raid and network interfaces... Are they Sun Servers?? Which OS?? What config?

i doubt that you can make FC boot in gui in ~15 seconds 🙂 atleast kde or gnome wont allow u that . That would require lot of tweaking . Fastest distro i ever used is vectorlinux , it boots up really quick even on old p3 system with low ram .

QUOTE(max @ May 26 2006, 09:00 PM) [snapback]52384[/snapback]
Netfreak what kinda servers do you have? Seems they are either heavily loaded or have slow disks or lotsa fast disks, raid and network interfaces... Are they Sun Servers?? Which OS?? What config?
[/b]
OS is z/OS on most of heavy lifting servers. Medium load servers are from Tandem. Servers with lesser load run Solaris.

Small peripheral servers (e.g. email, web) run windows, servers on boundary run QNX.

Servers are among most powerful that money can buy in open market. And there are strict govt regulations on how much load you can put on a single server. max proc usage is around 60%. This is due to mission critical nature of services that run on these.

Imagine what will happen if servers running ATC or NOARD malfunction. 60% of commercial aircrafts will be in immediate danger. Though I do not work in this particular industry. In any industry like Telecom, financial services or defense, restarting a server means a weeks preparation and in some cases govt approval.

And most z/OS Tandem servers have 2 or 4 times hardware for every virtual component. For example, 8 processor server actually has 16 or 32 processors. and 2 or 4 procs are paired to create a virtual processor.

Any instruction that is "supposed" to be executed by a proc is simultaneously executed by 2 or 4 of them. And system checks if all of them give the same output. This way system comes to know of hardware errors as soon as they occur. And your 8 way system becomes a 7 way system. And you do not need to power down the system to replace a faulty processor. Same happens with RAM (each read comes from 2 or 4 actual RAM modules, and system checks if all are giving the same value)

Sanity check (similar to POST in PCs) alone takes 15 mins on such a beast.