Re: Windows 11 for Workstations vs. Linux Mint

On Sun, 12/22/2024 3:32 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

 
Here’s a fun thing: try putting four billion files into an NTFS directory,
not from Windows, but from Linux. You will likely find it works a lot
better.
 

Well, you and I, we know the NTFS driver on Linux is slower
than the one on Windows. And understandably so, when
the NTFS driver was designed by painstaking reverse
engineering, rather than having a spec in hand to aid
in writing the driver.

I once carried out a test, comparing NTFS file creation
to TMPFS file creation. At the time (a slower processor),
NTFS could CreateFile() about 4000 files a second.
TMPFS could create 186000 files a second.

But what I didn't discover at the time, is that as TMPFS
fragments, it gets slower, and it is hard to say what
the steady state for it would be, from a performance perspective.

*******

I just spun up a backup file with 64 million files in it.
It took maybe twelve minutes to restore.

If I do Properties on the restored folder, it takes *one hour*
to count the 64 million files. And this is a tree
structure, not a single flat directory.

   [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/3xWsRv4d/64-million-files-writeidx4.gif

The file system could hold 64 times that many files,
but my hardware setup can't go there (not enough room).
There is a computer that could do it, but I can't
afford that (a computer that could hold four
billion files in RAM). That's the largest experiment I can do,
which does not wear any hardware at all. No hard drive
heads got slapped around 64 million times to make that.

  Paul