6 ms·

VMWare is a must for Windows. Code compiles 10x faster in a virtual machine on Windows than it does if you compile on Windows natively. Or 100x faster if you fo

by jart 4y ago

VMWare is a must for Windows. Code compiles 10x faster in a virtual machine on Windows than it does if you compile on Windows natively. Or 100x faster if you forgot to disable Windows Defender. I've always found that amusing.

cassepipe 4y ago
Any idea of why this is?
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Most compilation processes create a lot of very small files. Or a metric ton of them if you're unlucky enough to do js. NTFS is awful at doing lots of small accesses on very small files, at least compared to Ext4. Add to that the fact that if you're on WSL, it needs to write POSIX attributes (which NTFS has no support for and therefore WSL must emulate), and that's a recipe for builds being slowed massively by IO. As for Defender, well, Defender sees new files and halts everything while it scans them. You can see how that can be a problem for a process that pops out tens of thousands of temporary files, which it will all go and scan, locking them while it does so.
  - jart 4y ago
    Another thing that makes Windows builds go slow is the lack of vfork(). On Linux, vfork() lets you create and teardown a new process in ~30 microseconds. On Windows it takes about 6000 microseconds to do the same thing, which is in large part due to the lack of copy-on-write memory (which Windows won't support, due to Microsoft corporate culture being heavily biased against overcommit models).
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    > which NTFS has no support for and therefore WSL must emulate With ntfs3 (kernel 6) this is no longer true, as can be seen for example in Arch install living next to windows on C:\ https://gist.github.com/motorailgun/cc2c573f253d0893f429a165b5f851ee https://gist.github.com/motorailgun/cc2c573f253d0893f429a165... Also NTFS has had POSIX attributes support - they just weren't used before.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      Note that I said WSL, not WSL2.
      - csdvrx 4y ago
        And I insist: NTFS has support for POSIX attributes. NTFS3 proves that: you can install arch on C:\, and use it normally. WSL1 doesn't support POSIX attributes, just like ntfs-3g didn't support them, but it's not a limitation of NTFS.
criddell 4y ago
That's not my experience with C++.
bpye 4y ago
Full transparency, I work at Microsoft on the hypervisor. What do you find that VirtualBox does better than Hyper-V?
- jart 4y ago
  I use VMWare Workstation Player to run a bunch of different operating systems on Windows, e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows 7, etc. It's served my needs pretty well for some time. Hyper-V as I understand it is pretty new. I think I'm using it to run WSL2 and I'm pretty happy with its performance. However I don't know how to use Hyper-V as a VMWare replacement. I'd imagine if it's able to do that, the learning curve would be a bit higher due to the CLI.

by jart 4y ago

cassepipe 4y ago

Any idea of why this is?

ohgodplsno 4y ago
Most compilation processes create a lot of very small files. Or a metric ton of them if you're unlucky enough to do js. NTFS is awful at doing lots of small accesses on very small files, at least compared to Ext4. Add to that the fact that if you're on WSL, it needs to write POSIX attributes (which NTFS has no support for and therefore WSL must emulate), and that's a recipe for builds being slowed massively by IO. As for Defender, well, Defender sees new files and halts everything while it scans them. You can see how that can be a problem for a process that pops out tens of thousands of temporary files, which it will all go and scan, locking them while it does so.
- jart 4y ago
  Another thing that makes Windows builds go slow is the lack of vfork(). On Linux, vfork() lets you create and teardown a new process in ~30 microseconds. On Windows it takes about 6000 microseconds to do the same thing, which is in large part due to the lack of copy-on-write memory (which Windows won't support, due to Microsoft corporate culture being heavily biased against overcommit models).
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > which NTFS has no support for and therefore WSL must emulate With ntfs3 (kernel 6) this is no longer true, as can be seen for example in Arch install living next to windows on C:\ https://gist.github.com/motorailgun/cc2c573f253d0893f429a165b5f851ee https://gist.github.com/motorailgun/cc2c573f253d0893f429a165... Also NTFS has had POSIX attributes support - they just weren't used before.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Note that I said WSL, not WSL2.
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      And I insist: NTFS has support for POSIX attributes. NTFS3 proves that: you can install arch on C:\, and use it normally. WSL1 doesn't support POSIX attributes, just like ntfs-3g didn't support them, but it's not a limitation of NTFS.

criddell 4y ago

That's not my experience with C++.

bpye 4y ago

Full transparency, I work at Microsoft on the hypervisor. What do you find that VirtualBox does better than Hyper-V?

jart 4y ago
I use VMWare Workstation Player to run a bunch of different operating systems on Windows, e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows 7, etc. It's served my needs pretty well for some time. Hyper-V as I understand it is pretty new. I think I'm using it to run WSL2 and I'm pretty happy with its performance. However I don't know how to use Hyper-V as a VMWare replacement. I'd imagine if it's able to do that, the learning curve would be a bit higher due to the CLI.