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

Interestingly I ran a direct comparison of a popular Python app on a Windows 10 x64 Machine (low powered admittedly) and a Ubuntu 14.04 VM running on the same machine.

I have not tested load speeds etc, but am just looking at processor usage between the two. To make the test fair, both were fresh installs and I duplicated a part of my media library and applied the same config in both scenarios. Each test was run independently.

• On Windows Python was using 20% of my processor power and it triggered System Compressed Memory to run up at 40% (this is an old machine with 6GB or RAM).
• With the VM on Ubuntu (linked to my windows file system) the processor usage is about 5% with compressed memory down to about 20%.

This is a huge difference. My trigger for running this test was that the app using python was running my CPU up to 100% and failing to operate. I have now been running it in the VM for 2 weeks and my processor usage is down to 65-70% on average. So both on a long and short term test, and taking into account the overhead of running a VM and second operating system, this Python app is significantly faster on Linux. I can also confirm that the Python app responds better, as does everything else on my machine.

Now this could be very application specific, but it is at minimum interesting.

The PC is an old AMD II X2 X265 Processor, 6GB of RAM, SSD HD (which Python ran from but the VM used a regular 5200rpm HD which gets used for a ton of other stuff including recording of 2 CCTV cameras).