Why is creating a new process more expensive on Windows than Linux?

Question

I\'ve heard that creating a new process on a Windows box is more expensive than on Linux. Is this true? Can somebody explain the technical reasons for why it\'s more expen

Answer 1

The key to this matter is the historical usage of both systems, I think. Windows (and DOS before that) have originally been single-user systems for personal computers. As such, these systems typically don't have to create a lot of processes all the time; (very) simply put, a process is only created when this one lonely user requests it (and we humans don't operate very fast, relatively speaking).

Unix-based systems have originally been multi-user systems and servers. Especially for the latter it is not uncommon to have processes (e.g. mail or http daemons) that split off processes to handle specific jobs (e.g. taking care of one incoming connection). An important factor in doing this is the cheap fork method (that, as mentioned by Rob Walker (47865), initially uses the same memory for the newly created process) which is very useful as the new process immediately has all the information it needs.

It is clear that at least historically the need for Unix-based systems to have fast process creation is far greater than for Windows systems. I think this is still the case because Unix-based systems are still very process oriented, while Windows, due to its history, has probably been more thread oriented (threads being useful to make responsive applications).

Disclaimer: I'm by no means an expert on this matter, so forgive me if I got it wrong.