3 ms·

I've installed a clean windows 11 on some okay hardware a few days ago (i7 10750H, 32G ram, two 5GB/s NVMe SSD, GTX 2060) and everything is so astonishingly slo

I've installed a clean windows 11 on some okay hardware a few days ago (i7 10750H, 32G ram, two 5GB/s NVMe SSD, GTX 2060) and everything is so astonishingly slow, at first I was mad but now I'm just utterly amazed. I'll sometime wait three seconds for the explorer to open. Launching any non-trivial app takes on average 10 seconds. Sometimes copying stuff from a disk to another will show the incredible speed of 2 MB/s on stuff that should be literally instant. I have to wait for git which literally never happens to me on Linux ; just opening an MSYS shell lags (it's just a console and bash ffs!). MsMpEng.exe uses 15 - 20% CPU constantly even when turning every A/V shit off. And let's not even talk about usability - I got stuck for some reason with keyboard layouts that I didn't install, and apparently in Win 11, by default, not less than THREE SHORTCUTS will switch between layouts - ctrl+shift, alt+shift and win+space, which made coding absolutely insane until I could find a way to the "advanced keyboard settings" where the "alt+shift" shortcut could be turned off (which apparently also automagically turned off the "ctrl+shift" one). And I could find hundred of messages on boards complaining about this, with "Microsoft MVPs" answering with the most generic and useless advice like "chkdsk", "do a check from your bios", "update your drivers". Linux on the same hardware absolutely flies even when ran from a USB 2 stick, with as much eye candy with e.g. KDE Plasma. And let's not talk about C++ compile times which are insane in Windows with the exact same compiler & toolchain (clang 16, libc++, lld...) compared to Linux, even when taking care of installing it on a separate drive, excluding the whole drive from virus scan...

distract8901 3y ago
My work laptop runs windows. 16 core 3.4GHz I7, pretty respectable. It should be, it's brand new. C++ compilation takes more than twice as long as my Linux server from 2010. It's got two 16 core Xeon 2600-something processors at 2.6GHz. GCC doesn't even fully load the processors, it's something like 70% average and still runs twice as fast. Fortunately, the exact details of my job have changed and I can switch to Linux soon. If my work machine still can't compete with my server, I can just slap distcc on it and use my server as a remote compile node. Might do it anyway, the compile is 'only' five minutes on my server, if I can combine these machines it'll likely halve again.
- baz00 3y ago
  That'll probably be NTFS shafting you. It's terrible at handling small files. Trick I found was to fire up a Linux VM and do your compilation in there.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Also Windows file handling in general. It's incredibly flexible, allowing an arbitrary number of drivers to log or modify every disk access. That's great if you want real-time antivirus software, transparent file encryption (without encrypting the full partition), data-loss prevention software, advanced file syncing etc. But it also makes workflows that access lots of small files very slow. Instead of a VM you can also use WSL2, assuming you put the files in the linux file system instead of accessing the host file system. (Yes, technically that's also just a fancy VM running in Hyper-V; but it's a more integrated experience than e.g. VMWare)
    - distract8901 3y ago
      Yeah, granted the server is running a zfs pool on 7 mechanical SAS drives. But the windows machine has an nvme drive so I thought it'd even out. Looking into compiler optimization, I can tell it's a very deep rabbithole that I'd rather stay away from if at all possible
  - distract8901 3y ago
    I actually hadn't even thought of that. I'll have to see what performance on a VM is like these days, maybe it'll be enough to do my normal daily work? Last time I tried that was back in the windows 7 days and VMs were almost unusable.
    - baz00 3y ago
      If you provision the whole disk up front i.e. reserve space then it'll be near native. That applies to Hyper-V, VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox VMs. WSL this is not necessarily the case. I don't use WSL for a number of reasons including that.

distract8901 3y ago

My work laptop runs windows. 16 core 3.4GHz I7, pretty respectable. It should be, it's brand new. C++ compilation takes more than twice as long as my Linux server from 2010. It's got two 16 core Xeon 2600-something processors at 2.6GHz. GCC doesn't even fully load the processors, it's something like 70% average and still runs twice as fast. Fortunately, the exact details of my job have changed and I can switch to Linux soon. If my work machine still can't compete with my server, I can just slap distcc on it and use my server as a remote compile node. Might do it anyway, the compile is 'only' five minutes on my server, if I can combine these machines it'll likely halve again.

baz00 3y ago
That'll probably be NTFS shafting you. It's terrible at handling small files. Trick I found was to fire up a Linux VM and do your compilation in there.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Also Windows file handling in general. It's incredibly flexible, allowing an arbitrary number of drivers to log or modify every disk access. That's great if you want real-time antivirus software, transparent file encryption (without encrypting the full partition), data-loss prevention software, advanced file syncing etc. But it also makes workflows that access lots of small files very slow. Instead of a VM you can also use WSL2, assuming you put the files in the linux file system instead of accessing the host file system. (Yes, technically that's also just a fancy VM running in Hyper-V; but it's a more integrated experience than e.g. VMWare)
  - distract8901 3y ago
    Yeah, granted the server is running a zfs pool on 7 mechanical SAS drives. But the windows machine has an nvme drive so I thought it'd even out. Looking into compiler optimization, I can tell it's a very deep rabbithole that I'd rather stay away from if at all possible
- distract8901 3y ago
  I actually hadn't even thought of that. I'll have to see what performance on a VM is like these days, maybe it'll be enough to do my normal daily work? Last time I tried that was back in the windows 7 days and VMs were almost unusable.
  - baz00 3y ago
    If you provision the whole disk up front i.e. reserve space then it'll be near native. That applies to Hyper-V, VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox VMs. WSL this is not necessarily the case. I don't use WSL for a number of reasons including that.