Post

My ubuntu-latest Github runner takes 21 seconds. The same job on windows-latest takes 1m47. I could do five Linux builds in the same time. Why is their Windows runner so bad?

Marc-Antoine Ruel

@maruel.ca

Both run on Azure. The Windows one runs the Windows Server Datacenter edition in Test Mode. Both use a local SSD for performance. Windows sucks at 2 things: opening files and creating processes. TL;DR: This is due to the way processes are created and the driver framework. Display looks like this:

20/12/24, 10:10 pm0 reposts6 likes

Marc-Antoine Ruel

@maruel.ca

20 Dec 2024

The problem is that a build does two things: opening a lot of files and creating a lot of processes. 🤷

Marc-Antoine Ruel

@maruel.ca

20 Dec 2024

When I was on Chromium, we spent an inordinate amount of time micro-optimizing the hell out of them. We got "reasonable" performance. Sadly there's on average a 10% performance degradation per major Windows release. The ratio has been surprisingly stable. Windows 2000 was the best in this regard.