8.1 speed issues

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, William D. Colburn (Schlake) wrote:

> So I've just upgraded from whatever was stable in 2004 to 8.1 (it's a 
> private file server in my house, I pay no attention to it until it crashes), 
> and uh, the speed difference is very noticeable.  In short, it's like I 
> bought a brand new machine that eleven times as fast when all I did was 
> upgrade the OS.  How on earth did you guys make such a dramatic improvement?

Well, I guess the good news is that we did a lot in six years.  The bad news 
is that figuring out which changes helped your specific configuration and 
workload would be quite tricky.  Certainly, our work on SMP optimization for 
scheduling, network stack, threading, storage, etc, has been a big deal.  Thre 
are also countless protocol improvements in TCP/IP, significant changes in 
file system code, ... that could well be involved.

Needless to say, it's satisfying to hear that it worked out -- I'd like to 
think we have even further good stuff coming in 9!

Robert