I know I complain about this a lot but I hit another weird performance hiccup in WinXP today. I’m trying to track down an email issue I’ve been seeing with Thunderbird. To do this I need to scan my email tree on the mail server which is approximately 180,000 files. Doing these greps over the network seemed to be quite slow (over an hour) so I thought I’d make a local copy thinking it would be faster.
I drag the folder from the network drive onto my desktop. The file copy progress meter pops up with “Preparing to Copy”. I do some web browsing looking for some info on the Thunderbird issue for about 10 minutes and notice that it’s still in the “Preparing to Copy ” state.
I go over to my Mac, find the folder on the network and drag it to its desktop. I get the Finder copy progress meter “Preparing to copy # files…”. 10 minutes later the copy is complete.
About 5 minutes later the WinXP starts copying the files with a time estimate of 95 minutes to do the copy. It takes about 45 minutes. So the Mac did the copy in ~10 minutes and the WinXP box did it ~70 minutes.
Both machines have similar hardware configurations and both have gigabit connections to the server. The WinXP machine is not running a virus scanner or anything else that should slow down copies.
In the time it took to start the copy on WinXP, I had gotten bored waiting on the PC, copied the data onto the Mac, did the searching, found what I was looking for and had deleted the data.
I’m not claiming that this is a common scenario but almost every time I have to do something in WinXP that involves a lot of files it seems to take a really long time. It’s one of the types of things that make me question whether or not Windows XP is truly a workstation class OS.
You know, Flipcode and Pat’s blog have been dead for a couple of years now. Time to update those links.
— John Hattan Jan 6, 05:58 PM #
I know, the whole thing needs an overhaul…
— Bryan Mau Jan 9, 12:53 AM #