Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests

Forget fear, uncertainty and doubt. How do Windows Vista and Linux really compare against each other? It’s one thing to talk about the familiar applications available to Windows users contrasted with the rich suite of free open source apps for Linux, but something totally different to actually compare the loads of the two operating systems as they perform functionally identical tasks.

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For this test I have two laptops. Unfortunately they’re not strictly equal, in fact the Windows Vista system has an edge. It is an ASUS VX2 Lamborghini with 4GB RAM, an Intel Core 2 T7400 CPU running at 2.16GHz and a windows experience index of 4.7. The version of Windows is Windows Vista Ultimate with service pack 1 – and all other updates applied as at the time of writing. The hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400 RPM disk and the video card is an nVidia GeForce Go 7700.

I’m also running Red Hat Fedora 9 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. Both are 15” models, and the Dell also has 4GB RAM. It is less powerful with an Intel Core 2 T5600 CPU running at 1.83GHz (and a cache of 2MB, half that of the T7400.) The Dell contains a Toshiba MK1234GSX hard drive which also runs at 5,400 RPM but contains only onboard video, specifically an Intel 945GM chipset with 8MB of “stolen” memory. Fedora has been updated to include all the patches available as at the time of writing.

Let’s first compare the two systems at rest. This is the load the computers are under straight after a reboot and login. Vista is running the Aero theme and Fedora Linux is running Compiz with desktop effects enabled. The Windows Sidebar is enabled; I considered disabling it but this test ought to reasonably reflect actual usage, not any ideal settings tuned for best results. Consequently, I also haven’t disabled the WiFi or Bluetooth drivers on either machine, along with the various programs that run on startup. This includes Symantec Antivirus on the Windows machine as well as OneNote (Windows) and Tomboy (Linux) used for making quick notes.

Windows sits at 1.12GB RAM in use and 98 running processes. The CPU usage fluctuates between 4% and 24%; most of this is taskmgr.exe – the task manager – and a small contribution comes from the Sidebar and dwm.exe, the desktop window manager. By contrast, Linux is using 1.06GB of RAM although with 141 running processes, and a CPU load sitting dead still at 1%. If I click the Resources tab of the System Monitor the CPU load ramps up to over 20%. This is most likely due to the lack of a dedicated video card and the processor being required to draw the graphs which appear on this page. This problem doesn’t occur when using top within a console window.

One thing which is especially interesting is the different approaches the two operating systems take towards swapping main memory out to disk. While Windows shows many hundreds of page faults occurring Linux has a clear zero kilobytes of swap space being used. Let me tell you what this means, and then let’s fire up a web browser and word processor.