Yeah, I know that’s impossible, and I apologize if you happen to have developed intolerance to mindless drivels from out-of-work school teachers.
In practice, the registry grows larger rapidly as applications are installed or removed and it becomes slower.
Right, because apparently Windows tries and solves the travelling salesman problem every time it accesses the registry. Otherwise, I don’t see how working with indexed data can possibly be slower than, say, with plain text files.
There is even software for “cleaning” the registry to tune it up again.
And the cited text says quite clearly the following:
“On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer’s startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based operating systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing[...] More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry.” (italics mine)
GNU/Linux on the other hand does not tend to slow down much no matter how many applications are installed unless a bunch of them start processes by default.
Compare this to the following text by Pogson from the same post:
“Then, also, every other application installed wants to run a process or two and get pre-loaded at boot time whether or not the end-user will use it…” (italics mine)
Try and make sense out of this, I dare you.
Comments
Pogson: “A GNU/Linux system will run just as fast after five years of use while that other OS may need re-installation every few months.”
Well, I’ve yet to see a 5 years old Linux install. The thing is that you can’t keep a Linux Desktop install more than 1 year.
And about Windows, well, thanks Robert, but my 4 years old XP install works just fine, just like any XP install used by a sane user.
And believe me, if you put joe sixpack (who installs any software he finds, clicks anywhere he can, and believes every ad he sees) in front of a Linux install with the root password, he will break it much faster than any Windows XP install.
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA! I’ve seldom had a Linux distro last past the first round of updtes… never mind 5 years. As for registry cleaners in Windows, I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t hurt to clean out some of the cruft, but realistically… I have never EVER noticed some magical improvement in performance after using one. The simple fact is that a few tens or hundreds of kilobytes of data is NOT gonna significantly slow down a semi-modernish computer.
Pogson is probably eagerly anticipating the release of The Matrix since the guy is obviously stuck in 1999.
This would explain why he still thinks linux is viable for keeping old hardware “useful” (ie: sitting there, turned on, doing nothing).
Pogson fails to realize that the same people who run admin on their Windows account will happily run root on Linux.
It’s in the comments section of “Malware is Winning”, one of Pogson’s fail posts.
@Reactosguy, he fails to see acknowledge that when it comes to security, the weakest point in the OS is usually the user.
Good show, Joe.
Even by Poggo San’s standards, this one is extraordinarily lame. It seems to boil down to this:
“Yes, That Other Etc is faster and better and more reliable out of the box, but you just wait until you try installing an application on it!”
OK, Poggo, I accept your challenge. In fact, I will accept it on your own terms. Hmm, let’s see:
Chrome/Firefox Browser, check. Open Office (hawk spit), check. ActiveState Python/Perl/whatever, check. Hell, even Thunderbird, because I’m gonna need an email client; check.
There’s probably a few more I could dig up. All of them intended for use on Linux. All of them popular. All of them working on That Other Etc.
And all of them working faster on TOE.
Good lord, I must be at least six sigmas off the norm on this one. Praise be to random scattered ini files that have no knowledge of the existence of other random scattered but nevertheless non-orthogonal ini files!
Speed is of the essence. I recommend that Pog-Boy snorts some as soon as possible. It cannot possibly make him more paranoid.
Oh, and this one small “rebuttal” that Pogbot delivers in that post:
“The registry is fluffy. It becomes huge and does not scale. In comparison, GNU/Linux has to read one small text file to configure an app at loading. It scales. The same amount of disc I/O is done for each load whereas growth of the registry means more seeking.
That’s the beauty of GNU/Linux. Stuff does only what it has to. That other OS is doing needless work for every simple task. Security updates as well as bug-fixes and upgrades are all done by one simple mechanism. No muss. No fuss. It makes it very easy to maintain a GNU/Linux system. You can do it manually, interactively or by scripts. It is just as easy to maintain one machine as a hundred.”
There is so much fail in every single sub-clause of that statement that I wouldn’t know where to start…
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