Star Face Off: Windows vs Linux Real World RAM and Disk Tests
Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 22nd Jul 2008 17:54 UTC
Benchmarks David Williams over at iTWire has done a comparison of Windows vs Linux. It is performed by doing functionally identical tasks in both the OSes. This comparison is not a fair one by any measure. The laptops running the Windows and Linux were different in the hardware config and the software used for the tests were comparable but clearly different (MS Office vs OpenOffice; IE vs Firefox 3).
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RE: What a waste of disk space...
by raver31 on Tue 22nd Jul 2008 19:10 UTC in reply to "What a waste of disk space..."
raver31
Member since:
2005-07-06

Agreed, for the stats to mean anything the testing should have been done on the same machine.
Install the OS, do the timings, clear the machine, install the other OS, do the timings again.
Anything else is a waste of space. I am sorry I read the article, it was just one big Linux advert.
We Linux users neither need or like sites like this ;)

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 9

satan666 Member since:
2008-04-18

"Install the OS, do the timings, clear the machine, install the other OS, do the timings again. "

You don't even need to wipe out one OS to install another. You can simply install both in the same time and dual boot.
Edit: on the same machine I mean (just to clarify things).

Edited 2008-07-22 19:24 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

raver31 Member since:
2005-07-06

"Install the OS, do the timings, clear the machine, install the other OS, do the timings again. "

You don't even need to wipe out one OS to install another. You can simply install both in the same time and dual boot.
Edit: on the same machine I mean (just to clarify things).


You cant do that either, the OS that is installed at the start of the drive will enjoy faster access times than the OS installed from the later parts of the platters.

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bert64 Member since:
2007-04-23

Which means that the two os's will be at different parts of the disk with different performance characteristics...
Better to get 2 identical machines, or at least 2 identical drives.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

merkoth Member since:
2006-09-22

The sad part is that it isn't even fair with Linux, stating that Fedora uses 1 Gb of RAM at boot is just BS, or he really fscked up his installation. I'm not a regular Fedora user, but that number is just nonsense.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 6

Almindor Member since:
2006-01-16

I think the guy probably doesn't even know how to measure PROPER memory usage. In Linux the majority of RAM is used up to cache stuff. The more you have the more it likes to cache.

For example my friend had 256mb ram on an older computer yet after boot, Ubuntu used only about half of it, and the rest was cache, no swap at all.

Same distro on my 1gb machine used up about same amound of RAM but MUCH more cached stuff. No swap of course either.

I bet his real usage was say 256mb, but he also counted the cached stuff.

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