Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here is a somewhat foolish test

Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times. C:\>busybox sh ~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest ~ $ time sh timetest real 0m 46.86s user 0m 46.76s sys 0m 0.04s Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the fastest: $ cat timetest x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done $ time dash timetest 0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.