5 ms·

I can't stand Windows, but wanted to point something out to all blind Windows haters out there: look at Vista vs Ubuntu numbers. Windows beats Linux running MRI

I can't stand Windows, but wanted to point something out to all blind Windows haters out there: look at Vista vs Ubuntu numbers. Windows beats Linux running MRI by 10-50% in nearly all tests [when they pass] which aligns perfectly with my own observations. Certainly such big difference can't be explained by more effective system calls. I attribute this to Microsoft's superior C/C++ compiler. Back in my C++ loving days I played with various compilers regularly, and MSVC has always been the most optimizing, and kept advancing rapidly from version to version. It also compiles 2-3 times faster than GCC if I remember correctly... uhhh I miss it. :-) Also his JRuby startup time is inaccurate. No way JVM starts in under a second: it's more like 2 full seconds on his hardware. More likely he had some of JVM in the filesystem cache. Vista/OSX will pre-fetch JVM modules even after you reboot (not sure about Linux) if you run Java software and especially if you have 8GB of RAM...

nanexcool 18y ago
Why is it that, more often than not, whenever someone says something positive about a Microsoft product or the company itself, they have to start with: - I can't stand Windows but... - I'm 100% GNU/Linux but... - Microsoft and/or BillG can burn in hell but... - etc. Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash? Can I post this reply without fear of it being buried?
- old-gregg 18y ago
  Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash? This wasn't the first positive post about Microsoft tech I've ever done. The answer to your question is: no we can't. :-) Just recently I got beaten to death by OSX and Linux fanboys on reddit for mentioning superior threading/process switching on Windows.
  - nanexcool 18y ago
    Sorry, didn't mean to single you out!
- mixmax 18y ago
  Yes we're all informed people, but we're also mere mortals suspectible to the same psychology as everyone else. Including instinctively downvoting something that doesn't fit with our worldview.
kingkongrevenge 18y ago
There are other faster options on Linux than gcc, you know. Doesn't icc benchmark faster than vc++? I'm not sure why you don't hear more about gcc vs icc & borland in the open source world. They are free for non-commercial use after all.
- smanek 18y ago
  Because icc's performance isn't great on non-intel cpus? And it isn't particularly portable (only available for Windows, Linux, OS X). Plus, the open source world got burned pretty badly by BitKeeper. Now they want to use free (as in speech) tools.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    > Because icc's performance isn't great on non-intel cpus? I'm not sure that's true. I think it still out-performs gcc on AMD chips.
    - smanek 18y ago
      It's definitely possible. I haven't seen any benchmarks myself. I just remembered hearing that ICC purposefully produced crippled code on amd cpus. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAss...). The relevant section: Intel has designed its compiler purposely to degrade performance when a program is run on an AMD platform. To achieve this, Intel designed the compiler to compile code along several alternate code paths. Some paths are executed when the program runs on an Intel platform and others are executed when the program is operated on a computer with an AMD microprocessor. (The choice of code path is determined when the program is started, using a feature known as "CPUID" which identifies the computer’s microprocessor.) By design, the code paths were not created equally. If the program detects a "Genuine Intel" microprocessor, it executes a fully optimized code path and operates with the maximum efficiency. However, if the program detects an "Authentic AMD" microprocessor, it executes a different code path that will degrade the program’s performance or cause it to crash. I think the main reasons are ideological (icc isn't free as in beer) and practical (ICC doesn't work on a huge number of architectures or os's that gcc does).
jpedrosa 18y ago
He tested Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu and Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows. Ruby 1.8.7 has added some features found in Ruby 1.9.1 in order to provide a forward path for those wishing to start adopting the new Ruby 1.9.1 features. For whatever reason, Ruby 1.8.7 has become a little slower when compared to Ruby 1.8.6, in general, at least during some testing I have done. So there's more than reaches the eyes in those numbers of the benchmarks. Also, while Microsoft's C and C++ compiler provide lots of cool optimizations, Ruby is often compiled with just -O2 on Unix compatible systems because it's often fast enough, because Ruby is not known for trying to extract maximum performance from the bare metal anyway, so at the end of the day, things tend to a certain normalization which kills performance. For that reason, MinGW and even Cygwin can work way too well on Windows machines with GCC, with Ruby tasks in mind. Though there might be little incompatibilities here and there with things like threading, sockets and so on. I personally regard JRuby a great Ruby for Windows machines, because Java has great support there. More than that, though, I am excited with the work of the IronRuby guys because during my tests IronRuby has started performing within decent expectations, though it lags behind other Ruby implementations and has stability problems at this point.
- newt0311 18y ago
  Understand that unless the C/C++ code being compiled is actually targeted for gcc optimization, you won't get more than ~2-5% speedup in code even with -O3 or higher. Infact, go high enough like -O9 and you may even get incorrect code. The only time that settings like -O6 help are in cases like XaoS which is targeted for gcc optimization. Furthermore, MSVC is not the only compiler better than gcc. As of now, LLVM also produces significantly better code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286408
DarkShikari 18y ago
MSVC the "most advanced" compiler, despite: 1. Doesn't support C99. 2. Can't correctly align its stack, making SSE optimizations of any sort a complete nightmare and forcing us to disable a number of optimizations when compiling under MSVC. 3. Has the worst 32-bit libc I have ever seen in my life, with a memcpy that goes at less than 1 byte per clock cycle for small copies, a massive performance killer for large apps. 4. Completely incompatible with almost all features of the more widely used C compilers, e.g. AT&T-syntax inline assembly. ICC, on the other hand, supports nearly everything. 5. Loves to mangle its entire project file every time you change one small thing, resulting in enormous numbers of false deltas in version control. Now, I'm not big on GCC either and can come up with dozens of regressions and miscompilation problems with GCC, along with who-knows-how-many cases of suboptimal compilation. But at least it works and doesn't force us to mangle our entire codebase just to get it to compile! If you want to make an argument about compilers superior to GCC, pick one that is actually good, like ICC, rather a relic like MSVC. Merely what I have to do to keep supporting this late-80s-technology beast makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I mean, seriously, a compiler that doesn't even support variable declarations in the middle of a code block? It's 2008, folks.
look_lookatme 18y ago
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/a31872d447e867cb/40a92a28e9e03793 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/...
lneves 18y ago
No way JVM starts in under a second: it's more like 2 full seconds on his hardware. My machine has lower hardware specs than what the article mentions. This is what i get. $ java -version java version "1.6.0_10" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode) $ uname -a Linux lneves-t61p 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:15:32 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ echo "public class Test{public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println(\"Hello World\");}}" > Test.java $ javac Test.java $ time java Test Hello World real 0m0.174s user 0m0.068s sys 0m0.016s It seems that you are wrong. More likely he had some of JVM in the filesystem cache. Vista/OSX will pre-fetch JVM modules even after you reboot (not sure about Linux) if you run Java software and especially if you have 8GB of RAM... Do you mean Class Data Sharing? http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-sharing.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-shar... Lets disable it: $ time java -Xshare:off Test Hello World real 0m0.165s user 0m0.060s sys 0m0.040s Not much of a difference.
- petercooper 18y ago
  Just repeated your experiment on a MBP 2.2GHz. Got 0.424s real for the first attempt, then ~0.180s for all subsequent. So even on a far slower machine with no caching whatsoever, it's still under half a second :)
  - old-gregg 18y ago
    No caching? http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/otherFeatures/jqs.html http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/othe... OSX employs its own pre-caching similar to Vista. Think for second: how many various files need to be read off your hard drive for JVM to get started. There are some tools you can use (depends on your platform) that will help you with coming up with an exact list. That's A LOT of I/O. No hard drive will give you sub-second time.
    - petercooper 18y ago
      Does it matter if there's caching though? All modern operating systems cache / prelink / etc. Would you say C has a "30 second lag" because a basic "Hello world" program took 30 seconds to load including how long it takes the computer to start up from cold to run that program? After all, the operating system provides the APIs that C uses.. just as the JVM provides Java's. If a computer starts an app in, say, about 0.2 seconds every time, it's disingenuous to keep referring to some "2 second lag" since that 2 second lag never really occurs in real use under production conditions. At most, it happens once.
ig1 18y ago
Now I might be being stupid here but as far as I can see from the graph of total time that Vista and Ubuntu are roughly equivalent: http://antoniocangiano.com/images/shootout3/chart_total_time_small.png http://antoniocangiano.com/images/shootout3/chart_total_time...
michaelneale 18y ago
>Also his JRuby startup time is inaccurate. That comment is inaccurate ;)

nanexcool 18y ago

Why is it that, more often than not, whenever someone says something positive about a Microsoft product or the company itself, they have to start with: - I can't stand Windows but... - I'm 100% GNU/Linux but... - Microsoft and/or BillG can burn in hell but... - etc. Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash? Can I post this reply without fear of it being buried?

old-gregg 18y ago
Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash? This wasn't the first positive post about Microsoft tech I've ever done. The answer to your question is: no we can't. :-) Just recently I got beaten to death by OSX and Linux fanboys on reddit for mentioning superior threading/process switching on Windows.
- nanexcool 18y ago
  Sorry, didn't mean to single you out!
mixmax 18y ago
Yes we're all informed people, but we're also mere mortals suspectible to the same psychology as everyone else. Including instinctively downvoting something that doesn't fit with our worldview.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago

There are other faster options on Linux than gcc, you know. Doesn't icc benchmark faster than vc++? I'm not sure why you don't hear more about gcc vs icc & borland in the open source world. They are free for non-commercial use after all.

smanek 18y ago
Because icc's performance isn't great on non-intel cpus? And it isn't particularly portable (only available for Windows, Linux, OS X). Plus, the open source world got burned pretty badly by BitKeeper. Now they want to use free (as in speech) tools.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  > Because icc's performance isn't great on non-intel cpus? I'm not sure that's true. I think it still out-performs gcc on AMD chips.
  - smanek 18y ago
    It's definitely possible. I haven't seen any benchmarks myself. I just remembered hearing that ICC purposefully produced crippled code on amd cpus. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAss...). The relevant section: Intel has designed its compiler purposely to degrade performance when a program is run on an AMD platform. To achieve this, Intel designed the compiler to compile code along several alternate code paths. Some paths are executed when the program runs on an Intel platform and others are executed when the program is operated on a computer with an AMD microprocessor. (The choice of code path is determined when the program is started, using a feature known as "CPUID" which identifies the computer’s microprocessor.) By design, the code paths were not created equally. If the program detects a "Genuine Intel" microprocessor, it executes a fully optimized code path and operates with the maximum efficiency. However, if the program detects an "Authentic AMD" microprocessor, it executes a different code path that will degrade the program’s performance or cause it to crash. I think the main reasons are ideological (icc isn't free as in beer) and practical (ICC doesn't work on a huge number of architectures or os's that gcc does).

jpedrosa 18y ago

He tested Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu and Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows. Ruby 1.8.7 has added some features found in Ruby 1.9.1 in order to provide a forward path for those wishing to start adopting the new Ruby 1.9.1 features. For whatever reason, Ruby 1.8.7 has become a little slower when compared to Ruby 1.8.6, in general, at least during some testing I have done. So there's more than reaches the eyes in those numbers of the benchmarks. Also, while Microsoft's C and C++ compiler provide lots of cool optimizations, Ruby is often compiled with just -O2 on Unix compatible systems because it's often fast enough, because Ruby is not known for trying to extract maximum performance from the bare metal anyway, so at the end of the day, things tend to a certain normalization which kills performance. For that reason, MinGW and even Cygwin can work way too well on Windows machines with GCC, with Ruby tasks in mind. Though there might be little incompatibilities here and there with things like threading, sockets and so on. I personally regard JRuby a great Ruby for Windows machines, because Java has great support there. More than that, though, I am excited with the work of the IronRuby guys because during my tests IronRuby has started performing within decent expectations, though it lags behind other Ruby implementations and has stability problems at this point.

newt0311 18y ago
Understand that unless the C/C++ code being compiled is actually targeted for gcc optimization, you won't get more than ~2-5% speedup in code even with -O3 or higher. Infact, go high enough like -O9 and you may even get incorrect code. The only time that settings like -O6 help are in cases like XaoS which is targeted for gcc optimization. Furthermore, MSVC is not the only compiler better than gcc. As of now, LLVM also produces significantly better code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286408

DarkShikari 18y ago

MSVC the "most advanced" compiler, despite: 1. Doesn't support C99. 2. Can't correctly align its stack, making SSE optimizations of any sort a complete nightmare and forcing us to disable a number of optimizations when compiling under MSVC. 3. Has the worst 32-bit libc I have ever seen in my life, with a memcpy that goes at less than 1 byte per clock cycle for small copies, a massive performance killer for large apps. 4. Completely incompatible with almost all features of the more widely used C compilers, e.g. AT&T-syntax inline assembly. ICC, on the other hand, supports nearly everything. 5. Loves to mangle its entire project file every time you change one small thing, resulting in enormous numbers of false deltas in version control. Now, I'm not big on GCC either and can come up with dozens of regressions and miscompilation problems with GCC, along with who-knows-how-many cases of suboptimal compilation. But at least it works and doesn't force us to mangle our entire codebase just to get it to compile! If you want to make an argument about compilers superior to GCC, pick one that is actually good, like ICC, rather a relic like MSVC. Merely what I have to do to keep supporting this late-80s-technology beast makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I mean, seriously, a compiler that doesn't even support variable declarations in the middle of a code block? It's 2008, folks.

look_lookatme 18y ago

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/a31872d447e867cb/40a92a28e9e03793 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/...

lneves 18y ago

No way JVM starts in under a second: it's more like 2 full seconds on his hardware. My machine has lower hardware specs than what the article mentions. This is what i get. $ java -version java version "1.6.0_10" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode) $ uname -a Linux lneves-t61p 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:15:32 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ echo "public class Test{public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println(\"Hello World\");}}" > Test.java $ javac Test.java $ time java Test Hello World real 0m0.174s user 0m0.068s sys 0m0.016s It seems that you are wrong. More likely he had some of JVM in the filesystem cache. Vista/OSX will pre-fetch JVM modules even after you reboot (not sure about Linux) if you run Java software and especially if you have 8GB of RAM... Do you mean Class Data Sharing? http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-sharing.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-shar... Lets disable it: $ time java -Xshare:off Test Hello World real 0m0.165s user 0m0.060s sys 0m0.040s Not much of a difference.

petercooper 18y ago
Just repeated your experiment on a MBP 2.2GHz. Got 0.424s real for the first attempt, then ~0.180s for all subsequent. So even on a far slower machine with no caching whatsoever, it's still under half a second :)
- old-gregg 18y ago
  No caching? http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/otherFeatures/jqs.html http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/othe... OSX employs its own pre-caching similar to Vista. Think for second: how many various files need to be read off your hard drive for JVM to get started. There are some tools you can use (depends on your platform) that will help you with coming up with an exact list. That's A LOT of I/O. No hard drive will give you sub-second time.
  - petercooper 18y ago
    Does it matter if there's caching though? All modern operating systems cache / prelink / etc. Would you say C has a "30 second lag" because a basic "Hello world" program took 30 seconds to load including how long it takes the computer to start up from cold to run that program? After all, the operating system provides the APIs that C uses.. just as the JVM provides Java's. If a computer starts an app in, say, about 0.2 seconds every time, it's disingenuous to keep referring to some "2 second lag" since that 2 second lag never really occurs in real use under production conditions. At most, it happens once.

ig1 18y ago

Now I might be being stupid here but as far as I can see from the graph of total time that Vista and Ubuntu are roughly equivalent: http://antoniocangiano.com/images/shootout3/chart_total_time_small.png http://antoniocangiano.com/images/shootout3/chart_total_time...

michaelneale 18y ago

>Also his JRuby startup time is inaccurate. That comment is inaccurate ;)