OSNews

While I haven't benchmarked UNIX domain sockets, I seem to recalled the BlueOS people claiming that Linux kernel functions are faster than the equivilent BeOS ones, so I'm sure UNIX domain sockets are fast enough. And if you benchmark X, you'll notice that for a lot of stuff (like blitting bitmaps and whatnot) X is faster than even DirectX on Windows! The real bottleneck for X (modern versions of XFree I mean) are the toolkits and the underlying process model. On my machine, X is reniced to -11 and KDE is reniced to -10. My Konsole runs at 0, so all console apps (ie big compiles) get run at lower priority. It makes my system incredibly responsive, even under heavy loads. Its a pain to do manual jiggering like this, especially when WinNT and BeOS do it automatically, but once the setup is in place, its transparent.

As for LWPs vs Linux threads, I happen to dislike the LWP/HWP concept. While I can see that it has a purpose for certain server tasks where thousands of threads are needed, but on a regular desktop system there is little advantage to the model over the much more elegant and simple Linux model. Linux, btw, has a really cool process model where there is no distinction between threads and processes. Multiple "threads" are simply processes that share a memory, file, signal handler contexts. All of these can be independently shared by clone().

Two points about XFS. Version 1.1 fixes the delete performance on large trees. Its still probably slower than other systems, but its not really something noticible like it used to be. On most desktops, there are far more file grow operations than deletes, since a file grows many times in its lifetime. Thus, the tradeoff XFS makes (optimize file-grow performance at the expense of delete performance) is IMHO worth it.