3 ms·

Measuring total process count seems like a bit of a nonsense metric, it seems more related to how the services are structured or what features you want enabled

by kimixa 2y ago

Measuring total process count seems like a bit of a nonsense metric, it seems more related to how the services are structured or what features you want enabled rather than any measure of "goodness". From a security and robustness POV, surely /more/ process separation is a good thing?

tetris11 2y ago
Of course, and I recall there being a single windows process that pretty much did everything -- but at the same time I knew that there were no other processes acting in the background other than the ones I actively used, and Windows.
- anyfoo 2y ago
  So the point is just “shorter list is easier to look through, and remember which processes are supposed to be there”? In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries. Of course, that’s very different nowadays…
  - tetris11 2y ago
    Back then I was not so savvy with what every process did (over the years, of course, one learns). Windows XP had one main process, and everything else was practically userspace apps
    - anyfoo 2y ago
      Yeah, that makes sense. I think the (slight) backlash you get is from your original statement that that is what makes it the “best OS”, when in reality it arguably rather indicates some problems.
- kimixa 2y ago
  From what I remember a single svchost.exe process instance could be handing multiple "services" - you could see the mapping of service to PID in the Services, and there wasn't a 1:1 relationship. So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?
  - tetris11 2y ago
    But they were signed windows services, I didn't have to worry about any nefarious processes coming from the OS itself (at least, not back then...)
    - andrewshadura 2y ago
      There was no signing at that time.

by kimixa 2y ago

tetris11 2y ago

Of course, and I recall there being a single windows process that pretty much did everything -- but at the same time I knew that there were no other processes acting in the background other than the ones I actively used, and Windows.

anyfoo 2y ago
So the point is just “shorter list is easier to look through, and remember which processes are supposed to be there”? In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries. Of course, that’s very different nowadays…
- tetris11 2y ago
  Back then I was not so savvy with what every process did (over the years, of course, one learns). Windows XP had one main process, and everything else was practically userspace apps
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    Yeah, that makes sense. I think the (slight) backlash you get is from your original statement that that is what makes it the “best OS”, when in reality it arguably rather indicates some problems.
kimixa 2y ago
From what I remember a single svchost.exe process instance could be handing multiple "services" - you could see the mapping of service to PID in the Services, and there wasn't a 1:1 relationship. So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?
- tetris11 2y ago
  But they were signed windows services, I didn't have to worry about any nefarious processes coming from the OS itself (at least, not back then...)
  - andrewshadura 2y ago
    There was no signing at that time.