Disappointed I didn't see fairly reasonable explanations around processor security bugs which impact broad system performance such as Spectre and Meltdown.<p>This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...</a>
Some remarks:<p><i>I used Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice</i><p>That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine).<p><i>32GB fixed disk for each build.</i><p>That is much much less than the typical Windows 10 hardware.<p><i>the fast boot feature has been disabled for the purposes of this measurement.</i><p>That is not the default and not reflective of most installations.
On my current gaming PC (i7-7700) I have installed W10 in 2017 and... no problem whatsoever? SSD, 10s boot. idk how do people end up with all the problems. I'm really curious because there must be an underlying reason
Not having a windows machine here to test this, I can't believe some of the results there. Specifically the "Win32 applications" ones. 7 seconds to open the file manager or text editor? Or MS Paint?! On my laptop here I can load gimp including plugins within ~1.5-2s, and I never even bothered to optimize anything about this. I wouldn't even be able to measure the opening time of e.g. gedit without some sort of scripting.<p>Are win32 apps <i>really</i> this slow to start up, or are the 7s "baseline" measurements in that experiment some cumulative value over all the applications?
This exactly mirrors my experience.<p>"Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.
How much of the slowdown has to do with the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations? There was a similar thread the other day about drastic performance hits on the Linux side.
The spike in there is really weird. I'm wonder if that's spectre mitigations causing the bulk of the slowdown. If that's the case I'd be curious to know if disabling them helps and if popular Linux distributions show similar performance loss.
My up-to-date Windows 10 on a 3 years old desktop takes 9 seconds to boot (I just benchmarked it). I don't remember it being way faster before.<p>So I wonder how OP gets 34 seconds, and how he went from 13 to 34 seconds over a couple of updates. Mine definitely didn't get 21 seconds slower.
One time Windows got a "feature update" that made it not boot. Apparently it was an issue with Lenovo motherboards that is still not fixed to this day (afaik). In any case, that was the kick in the pants I needed to switch to Linux. Everything has gone swimmingly since!
How were these measurements obtained? Are they an average, and if so what was the variance of the measurements? For some the difference seems substantial but without knowing the variance across measurements it is a little difficult to assess whether the differences are actually significant. (Basically would there be a statistically significant difference between each condition)<p>Obviously this would be a lot more work, so I don’t want to detract from the work that’s already been done.
I don't know about slowing down: I do know that I keep getting stuck on some update after which I can't moved beyond due to some cryptic and unfixable error.<p>This has happened for the 2nd time in a year and I end up having to download an up to date iso to move past the dead end update
I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.
These speed issues are annoying but the thing that kills my experience is the lost clicks - and when one is missed, because it's quite common that Windows is just being its usual useless self, you then don't know for sure if it really missed the click or not. Invariably the time you think "it did miss it, try again", you'll click again only to find that now your slow Windows machine is stupidly struggling to do the damn task twice!<p>The other issue doesn't sit completely with Windows: in a corporate environment, there are numerous remote activities that get hooked up without much thought or care and it only takes an occasional slow response with one or two of them for Windows to become unusable.
Would be interesting how much worse it is if you upgrade in-place. Or is that what this test did?<p>Overlaying SPECTRE etc. mitigations could also provide some insight.
This is purely speculation and observation but I had to disable all the anti-telemetry hacks on my (aging) W10 gaming desktop and I noticed a marked increase in latency in everything from opening a folder to launching simple applications. Once I re-enabled all the patches the latency seem to vanish.<p>I have no data or hard evidence to back any of this up so take it with a large grain of salt.
For me, every update seems to trigger some. NET compilation in the background (if I remember right). This process destroys your disk while it runs, and contributes a lot to the slowness in my experience.
I built my mom a moderate Windows PC for her accounting work a few years ago. Pretty standard Intel build, no graphics card cause it's not like she needs that.<p>And for the most part it works fine, until every few months it'll slow down to an unusably slow crawl and I'll have to hop into task manager, see what rogue Windows service is bugging out this time, Google it, and find some forum post somewhere telling me what registry edit I have to do to disable some service that restores it to full speed.
Sort of like MacOS, every update added more features and slowed it down.<p>The special effects slow it down, you can disable them:
<a href="https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10...</a>
Over the past decade, software updates in general have mostly become another form of malware, as software makers care more about extracting money from their users or adding pointless shiny features than actually making their software fast, stable, or better able to serve the user.<p>As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Windows and your browser at a bare minimum, and probably on any other software you use often or rely on. Yes, there are risks and downsides to doing this: security holes won't be patched, bugs won't be fixed, and new features won't be present. But everything in life is a balance. And on balance, the bad of updating is almost always worse than the good is good. This article highlights that in brilliant neon letters. How on EARTH do you justify boot and reboot times doubling or tripling, and just about every metric getting worse over time? Why would I let Microsoft fuck with my system if they're going to make it shittier?<p>And of course, the article leaves out the worst part. Never mind gradual performance drops, there's a good chance that update you just downloaded just broke something. Entirely. Something you NEED to work. When is a fix coming? Anyone's guess.<p>Install Windows 10 LTSB. It's the only one worth using. And unless you NEED a new feature or bugfix, never EVER update.
So... UWP is a tenbagger: It got 10x slower in 5 years.<p>I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.
All I know is my Win 10 Pro laptop has 16gb RAM, yet if an application, most likely Google Chrome, uses more than about 4-5gb, it crashes.<p>Yep, it's a lot of tabs. But not as many as you think, and often without warning, as certain ad-heavy sites, especially forum sites (flyertalk, rennlist), can sometimes require 1gb RAM alone.
I built a Windows PC after 3 years of using my 15 inch 2018 MBP (which is by far the worst machine I have owned considering the price).<p>Windows has gone to shit, I have visual glitches in the UI using dark mode (even the search box on bottom left doesn't render correctly in dark mode until I hover it). They preinstall some shitty "news" bar right there on the task bar and hide disabling it behind a submenu of a right click on taskbar. Start menu search goes online by default and misdirects me because of it (I disabled it quickly).<p>Using a 5k monitor and display scaling is very iffy as well compared to MacOS.<p>I'm waiting on next get M1 and then I'm using the Windows box as a docker server I'll SSH into and maybe play some games. But using it as a daily driver is really underwhelming. I would use Linux desktop but from what I've heard HDPI scaling is even worse.
Is there even a point to benchmarking boot up time when you can't rely on it being consistent? Sure, it may be thirty seconds ninety percent of the time but the other ten percent it takes ten minutes because it decided installing an update is more important than whatever you wanted to use your computer for. I would never, ever tolerate a Windows 10 machine being the only computer in the house. There's too many times I need something <i>right now</i> and I have to do it with my phone because Microsoft is too busy fellating itself. This problem becomes exponentially worse on any machine that spends most of its time shut down, like a travel laptop.
To me, Windows 10 feels like it's getting faster. I've noticed that updates (even major ones) complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (as opposed to the old Microsoft tradition of "randomly taking hours").
I would be curious to see a "windows picture" or something test. I don't remember the name but the default app for opening images in windows 10 is so slow that it feels like a joke.
150MB word document works fine on Office 2010 but it hangs Office365 desktop word. What the hell Microsoft? I had to use LibreOffice to edit a word document created in your Word!
> “Each version was clean installed.”<p>This might have been hard to recreate but I feel like some of the association with updates making things slower is the updating process itself. I was always told when a new Windows version came out that the advice was to back up files manually and clean install every time. I’d love to see a comparison between the statistics you have for clean installs and those done through the Windows Installer “Upgrade” path.
It would be interesting to see the results if windows was upgraded instead of doing clean install for each version.<p>I find upgraded to be the #1 cause for issues with windows. A clean install (using iso downloaded from MS) normally resolves pretty much all problems and upgrade be the one that creates them.
Glad to know it's windows and not my fault. My boot time went from 15 seconds to 30-45 now. I used to be able to reboot my computer and by the time I'd gotten a drink or tied my shoe it would be back to desktop. Beautiful. Now it's slow as hell.
This is great. I would especially love to see some sort of automated testing for this kind of benchmarking across different versions of windows, macos, linux, etc as well. I think it would be incredibly powerful for users to have access to these kind of metrics.
I'm not sure why they tested with disabled fast boot option? Why not disable every feature of system?<p>Fast boot from powerdown is the reason why I stop using other power down states. Just shut system down, and boot it up in 10-15 seconds.
I'm still on an 2nd gen i5 with 12gb of ram. Haven't noticed any slowdowns even with the huge amount of processes in the background. I've been updating regularly and have enjoyed Win10 for years.
I feel having a built-in graphics card that's poor also results in terrible performance, even if its just desktop use, things just become slow and laggy.
After a recent update, i know that my bluetooth started intermittenly disconnecting and reconnecting. Continuous connectivity problems. Not a coincidence.
All of the major slowdowns seem to pop up in build 1809, which is where the first Spectre/Meltdown mitigations were introduced, which is to be expected.
At what point does Windows 10 cross into what people would generally call "unstable software" and call Microsoft's classification of "stable release" as being way too low a bar?