3 ms·

Totally. Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything. Pretty

by jokoon 5y ago

Totally. Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything. Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me. I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse performance in certain cases? Maybe deep inside, w10 stopped using any optimization that allowed it to be fast on HDD, considering SSD should be the norm, but I fail to understand if this is choice that implies a difficult compromise, or if it's just laziness and negligence. Any linux dev could chime in?

brundolf 5y ago
I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?
- easton 5y ago
  It actually is the opposite of what you say, in that the Fast Boot feature of Windows 10 is basically logging you out then hibernating the system, which is faster on HDDs but slower on SSDs (or at best the same speed of a cold boot, but at the expense of system stability in the long term since NT really likes its reboots). It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
  - scns 5y ago
    It is possible to disable fastboot in the system settings. You need to do it if you want to dual boot linux.
- handrous 5y ago
  More than just on boot. For the brief time that I ran Win10 on an HDD, what it felt like was that the whole OS was almost constantly touching the disk, for whatever reason, often blocking. Open start menu? Better do a bunch of disk I/O. Moused over anything? Touch the disk. Pressed a key? Hit disk. Doing nothing? Disk time! Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
cmurf 5y ago
Maybe Microsoft removed the optimizations for rotational devices? XFS is considering it: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20200514103454.GL2040@dread.disaster.area/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20200514103454.GL2040@drea...
- bscphil 5y ago
  As I read that email, it seems to be saying the opposite: > We know when the underlying storage is solid state - there's a "non-rotational" field in the block device config that tells us the storage doesn't need physical seek optimisation. We should make use of that. In other words, the changes under consideration should only apply when they know they're using solid state storage. Is there information elsewhere which contradicts that? Indeed, it seems very surprising that XFS might consider removing optimizations for slower drives. It's a very popular file system in the enterprise, and anyone still storing large amounts of data is very likely to still be using rotational drives because of the massive cost difference.

by jokoon 5y ago

brundolf 5y ago

I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?

easton 5y ago
It actually is the opposite of what you say, in that the Fast Boot feature of Windows 10 is basically logging you out then hibernating the system, which is faster on HDDs but slower on SSDs (or at best the same speed of a cold boot, but at the expense of system stability in the long term since NT really likes its reboots). It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
- scns 5y ago
  It is possible to disable fastboot in the system settings. You need to do it if you want to dual boot linux.
handrous 5y ago
More than just on boot. For the brief time that I ran Win10 on an HDD, what it felt like was that the whole OS was almost constantly touching the disk, for whatever reason, often blocking. Open start menu? Better do a bunch of disk I/O. Moused over anything? Touch the disk. Pressed a key? Hit disk. Doing nothing? Disk time! Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

cmurf 5y ago

Maybe Microsoft removed the optimizations for rotational devices? XFS is considering it: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20200514103454.GL2040@dread.disaster.area/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20200514103454.GL2040@drea...

bscphil 5y ago
As I read that email, it seems to be saying the opposite: > We know when the underlying storage is solid state - there's a "non-rotational" field in the block device config that tells us the storage doesn't need physical seek optimisation. We should make use of that. In other words, the changes under consideration should only apply when they know they're using solid state storage. Is there information elsewhere which contradicts that? Indeed, it seems very surprising that XFS might consider removing optimizations for slower drives. It's a very popular file system in the enterprise, and anyone still storing large amounts of data is very likely to still be using rotational drives because of the massive cost difference.