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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. The machines are similar in processing power and the vista machine has 1GBs more memory.

I particularly notice this in Mercurial but I figure this may simply be how Mercurial is packaged on windows.

Martin Geisler
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Frank V
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  • I had Python slowness issues due to Kaspersky virus scanner actively scanning programs as they were run. However, Mercurial still ran full speed. While it may be written in python, the Hg exe is not interpreted. – Soviut Dec 04 '09 at 06:57

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I wanted to follow up on this and I found something that I believe is 'my answer'. It appears that Windows (vista, which is what I notice this on) is not as fast in handling files. This was mentioned by tony-p-lee.

I found this comparisons of Ubuntu vs Vista vs Win7. Their results are interesting and like they say, you need to take the results with a grain of salt. But I think the results lead me to the cause. Python, which I feel was indirectly tested, is about equivalent if not a tad-bit faster on Windows.. See the section "Richards benchmark".

Here is their graph for file transfers:

Graph - small file HD to HD
(source: tuxradar.com)

I think this specifically help address the question because Hg is really just a series of file reads, copies and overall handling. Its likely this is causing the delay.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-ubuntu-vs-vista-vs-windows-7

Glorfindel
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Frank V
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No real numbers here but it certainly feels like the start up time is slower on Windows platforms. I regularly switch between Ubuntu at home and Windows 7 at work and it's an order of magnitude faster starting up on Ubuntu, despite my work machine being at least 4x the speed.

As for runtime performance, it feels about the same for "quiet" applications. If there are any GUI operations using Tk on Windows, they are definitely slower. Any console applications on windows are slower, but this is most likely due to the Windows cmd rendering being slow more than python running slowly.

Chris Smith
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Maybe the python has more depend on a lot of files open (import different modules).

Windows doesn't handle file open as efficiently as Linux.

Or maybe Linux probably have more utilities depend on python and python scripts/modules are more likely to be buffered in the system cache.

tony-p-lee
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I run Python locally on Windows XP and 7 as well as OSX on my Macbook. I've seen no noticable performance differences in the command line interpreter, wx widget apps run the same, and Django apps also perform virtually identically.

One thing I noticed at work was that the Kaspersky virus scanner tended to slow the python interpreter WAY down. It would take 3-5 seconds for the python prompt to properly appear and 7-10 seconds for Django's test server to fully load. Properly disabling its active scanning brought the start up times back to 0 seconds.

Soviut
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  • You are probably on to something with the Virus scanner. I have a scanner on my windows machines but not on my OS X machine. I didn't think of that before. – Frank V Dec 04 '09 at 15:04
  • The new Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) scanner is far less aggressive than Kaspersky and Norton can be. I've had no problems running it while working with Python (or any compiler, for that matter). – Soviut Dec 04 '09 at 21:12
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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.

Daniel Quinlan
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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).

Innocuous
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