Python Performance on Windows

Question

Is Python generally slower on Windows vs. a *nix machine? Python seems to blaze on my Mac OS X machine whereas it seems to run slower on my Window\'s Vista machine

Answer 1

With the OS and network libraries, I can confirm slower performance on Windows, at least for versions =< 2.6.

I wrote a CLI podcast-fetcher script which ran great on Ubuntu, but then wouldn't download anything faster than about 80 kB/s (where ~1.6 MB/s is my usual max) on either XP or 7.

I could partially correct this by tweaking the buffer size for download streams, but there was definitely a major bottleneck on Windows, either over the network or IO, that simply wasn't a problem on Linux.

Based on this, it seems that system and OS-interfacing tasks are better optimized for *nixes than they are for Windows.