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There is not much discussion about Windows internals, not only because they are not shared, but also because quite frankly the Windows kernel evolves slower than the Linux kernel in terms of new algorithms implemented. For example it is almost certain that Microsoft never tested I/O schedulers, process schedulers, filesystem optimizations, TCP/IP stack tweaks for wireless networks, etc, as much as the Linux community did. One can tell just by seeing the sheer amount of intense competition and interest amongst Linux kernel developers to research all these areas.

The net result of that is a generally acknowledged fact that Windows is slower than Linux when running complex workloads that push network/disk/cpu scheduling to its limit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3368771 A really concrete and technical example is the network throughput in Windows Vista which is degraded when playing audio! http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/2...

Note: my post may sound I am freely bashing Windows, but I am not. This is the cold hard truth. Countless of multi-platform developers will attest to this, me included. I can't even remember the number of times I have written a multi-platform program in C or Java that always runs slower on Windows than on Linux, across dozens of different versions of Windows and Linux. The last time I troubleshooted a Windows performance issue, I found out it was the MFT of an NTFS filesystem was being fragmented; this to say I am generally regarded as the one guy in the company who can troubleshoot any issue, yet I acknowledge I can almost never get Windows to perform as good as, or better than Linux, when there is a performance discrepancy in the first place.


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