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

Uh, there seems to be a lot of "it's better this way" sort of justification going on.

I think people could benefit from reading "Showstopper"; the book about the development of Windows NT.

The whole reason the services run as DLL's in one process on Windows NT was that they were too slow as separate processes.

If you got down and dirty you'd find that the library loading strategy is the problem.

On Unices ( in general) the Shared libraries (DLL's) code segments are actually shared.

Windows NT loads a copy of the DLL per process, becauase it manipulates the library code segment (and executable code segment) after loading. (Tells it where is your data ?)

This results in code segments in libraries that are not reusable.

So, the NT process create is actually pretty expensive. And on the down side, it makes DLL's no appreciable saving in memory, but a chance for inter-app dependency problems.

Sometimes it pays in engineering to step back and say, "now, if we were going to design this to really suck, what would it look like?"

I worked with an embedded system that was quite temperamental once upon a time, and one day looked at it and realized it was a cavity magnetron, with the electronics in the microwave cavity. We made it much more stable (and less like a microwave) after that.