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by ok123456
1896 days ago
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Writing things that do a lot of forking, like using the multiprocess or subprocess modules in python, is basically unusable to my coworkers who use windows. Startup time for those processes goes from basically instant to 30+ seconds. I researched this a little bit and it seems that it may be related to DEP. |
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Even for servers the concept was and is still just one (Windows) server per function. If you were running MSSQL on a Domain Controller this was considered bad form/you're doing something wrong.
The "big change" with the switch to the NT kernel in Windows 2000 was "proper" multi-user permissions/access controls but again, the assumption was that only one user would be using the PC at a time. Even if it was a server! Windows Terminal Server was special in a number of ways that I won't get into here but know that a lot of problems folks had with that product (and one of many reasons why it was never widely adopted) were due to the fact that it was basically just a hack on top of an architecture that wasn't made for that sort of thing.
Also, back then PC applications didn't have too many files and they tended to be much bigger than their Unix counterparts. Based on this assumption they built in hooks into the kernel that allow 3rd party applications to scan every file on use/close. This in itself was a hack of sorts to work around the problem of viruses which really only exist because Windows makes all files executable by default. Unfortunately by the time Microsoft realized their mistake it was too late to change it and would break (fundamental) backwards compatibility.
All this and more is the primary reason why file system and forking/new process performance is so bad on Windows. Everything that supposedly mitigates these problems (keeping one process open/using threads instead of forking, using OS copy utilities instead of copying files via your code, etc) are really just hacks to work around what is fundamentally a legacy/out-of-date OS architecture.
Don't get me wrong: Microsoft has kept the OS basically the same for nearly 30 years because it's super convenient for end users. It probably was a good business decision but I think we can all agree at this point that it has long since fallen behind the times when it comes to technical capabilities. Everything we do to make our apps work better on Windows these days are basically just workarounds and hacks and there doesn't appear to be anything coming down the pipe to change this.
My guess is that Microsoft has a secret new OS (written from scratch) that's super modern and efficient and they're just waiting for the market opportunity to finally ditch Windows and bring out that new thing. I doubt it'll ever happen though because for "new" stuff (where you have to write all your stuff from scratch all over again) everyone expects the OS to be free.