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Disk "thrashiness" been a problem with Windows for a long time. Back in the 90s and early 2000s when slower mechanical hard drives with access lights made HDD s

by api 8y ago

Disk "thrashiness" been a problem with Windows for a long time. Back in the 90s and early 2000s when slower mechanical hard drives with access lights made HDD seeking and thrashing very noticeable, I always noticed that Windows boxes just thrashed the disk far more for trivial operations than Linux or even early MacOSX. (Never used Mac classic.) Windows has always been really clunky in terms of disk I/O. I've never been sure if the problem is in the kernel, filesystem, or higher up the stack. Linux on the other hand is spectacular here. In my experience it's marginally better than Mac on the same hardware (and way better than Windows!). I threw Linux on a spinning disk Mac Mini a while back with a really slow disk and found that it didn't matter much. Macs with SSDs are so much faster in part because MacOS seems less efficient on the disk front and SSDs make that less of a bottleneck. Linux is open source. Why hasn't everyone copied what Linux is doing? What is Linux doing?

zeusk 8y ago
I'm not sure what Linux does, but I'm glad Windows does not do that. Building a kernel on Linux would bring down my machine's interactivity to zero, even the mouse pointer would stop responding and this isn't even like two/three decades ago - this was in 2014 and I've never since touched the pile of crap that Ubuntu is.
- api 8y ago
  Not sure what was wrong, but that doesn't happen on any Linux system I have ever used. Then again I've never been an Ubuntu fan. Maybe they had some incredibly bizarre settings. Also seems like it could have been a driver problem.
  - AlotOfReading 8y ago
    I've had similar issues on multiple distros and boards over the years, easily replicable with any sort of intensive disk load. It's not one specific issue (as the underlying bugs get fixed and change over time), but simply that there are lots of little deadlocks in the IO subsystems. There are workarounds and kernel flags to help mitigate things, but no one should have to do that for a daily driver.

by api 8y ago

zeusk 8y ago

I'm not sure what Linux does, but I'm glad Windows does not do that. Building a kernel on Linux would bring down my machine's interactivity to zero, even the mouse pointer would stop responding and this isn't even like two/three decades ago - this was in 2014 and I've never since touched the pile of crap that Ubuntu is.

api 8y ago
Not sure what was wrong, but that doesn't happen on any Linux system I have ever used. Then again I've never been an Ubuntu fan. Maybe they had some incredibly bizarre settings. Also seems like it could have been a driver problem.
- AlotOfReading 8y ago
  I've had similar issues on multiple distros and boards over the years, easily replicable with any sort of intensive disk load. It's not one specific issue (as the underlying bugs get fixed and change over time), but simply that there are lots of little deadlocks in the IO subsystems. There are workarounds and kernel flags to help mitigate things, but no one should have to do that for a daily driver.