Why is ruby so much slower on windows?

Question

What are the specific technical causes of Ruby being so much slower on Windows? People report about a 3X speed drop from Linux/OSX and there are some vague discussions abou

Answer 1

ntfs automatic file compression on windows was slowing up everything for me. it starts working automatically when you are low on hd space... and then it needs to decompress and recompress files on the fly, as you access them, wasting cpu cycles..

Run the following command to uncompress a whole ntfs drive from its root (i.e. "C:\") and see if there are any differences, to me it made a huge difference and got ruby/rails speed back to what i was used to before !

command is:

compact /u /s /i