Do Swarm Programs run faster on Unix or Windows?
Steve Railsback posted a report in 1999 that the same program running under Linux took about 30% less time than it took under Windows. Not all users have reported a difference that great. On December 14, 1999, Marcus Daniels offered one explanation of the difference observed: One thing that is different with Cygwin is that the C library is less integrated with the operating system. Windows does not export POSIX system calls, so some of calls need emulation glue. Also, although both glibc and Cygwin use same malloc implementation, glibc takes advantage of virtual memory system calls, and Cygwin does not. I haven’t run tests, but I would expect memory-intensive simulations would be faster on glibc-based systems (e.g. Linux-based systems).
