RE: Operating Systems Linux vs. Windows

[Mario Gonzalez <mario.gonzalez@connecta.se>]

  Hello,
 
 Well, it is not a matter of doing things wrong, as you express it, I have
written lightning-fast encryption algorithms too, the aim this time was to
try to create something a bit more advanced and hopefully more secure. As
you may imagine, this requires more calculations and more scrambling and
key-handling. The code is written ANSI c/c++, ie no MFC or such involved,
just to make the code as efficient as possible. The algorithm itself, is
quite complex, it generates keytables, with 64000 elements of type long for
the generation of an encryption key, it generates password fingerprints and
so on. This is to create somewhat "secure" keys. The rest is low-level file
I/O and tons of bit operations. I think the code is heavy simply because our
algorithm includes reading and processing a  chunk of 4 chars 4 times (in
different ways) before writing it to the output file. What I do need to do,
and what I think can be done better, is to read bigger blocks (for example
1024 bytes at a time) into memory for faster access, I think this will
improve performance. Ill send the code to you if you are interested. 

As far as the Linux part is concerned, I simply think that the performance
difference is caused by that Windows has more background threads running
(owned by the system, of course), than Linux, giving Linux apps more memory
to play with.

Regards

Mario Gonzalez

PS. Does anyone know where to get the source for the ZIP-algorithm, or any
other good compression algorithms? Please let me know if you do.

-----Original Message-----
From: Habil Silva
To: gameprogrammer@gameprogrammer.com
Sent: 2000-03-12 13:41
Subject: Re: Operating Systems Linux vs. Windows


----- Original Message -----
From: Mario Gonzalez <mario.gonzalez@connecta.se>
To: <gameprogrammer@gameprogrammer.com>
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 3:00 PM
Subject: RE: Operating Systems Linux vs. Windows


> Hi!
>
> My opinion regarding this issue is that it is all a matter of gaining
> experience and to learn as much as one can about the OS being used...
>
> At work I use NT/Win2000, but at home I use Linux. I must admit that
in
the
> beginning, Linux wasn't the easiest thing to learn, but with time, I
got a
> certain "feel" for it, and now it is as good as any (if not better) OS
that
> I use, all purposes.
>
> From a programmer's point of view, Linux (or any UNIX-based system) is
very
> good for improving one's programming habits. On Linux you never get
away
> with being lazy, for examle if you forget to allocate memory for a
char*,
> you'll get runtime segmentation faults (the same code runs ok on win).
Also,
> Linux provides faster execution than windows. I ran my own encryption
> program (without changing the code) on an 10mb file, first on win,
then
> Linux. On windows, the execution time was 3.26 mins, and on linux the
same
> procedure took 1.10 mins. All of this was run on the same machine
(thank
god
> for dual boot), and yes, the algorithm that I use is _very_ heavy.
>

You must be doing something very wrong! I myself have designed an
encryption
program and it takes about 10 seconds to encrypt a 15Mb file under
Win98,
using an MFC application (I have a Celeron clocked at 487 MHz, and 64 Mb
RAM).
You say that your encryption algorithm is very heavy, but I still think
you
should be
able to optimize it a lot, no matter how heavy it is. Because 3.26 mins
is
too
much: a throughput of only 53 Kb/s!!

> So, chances are that your programs might get faster and more efficient
> programs on Linux, who knows, provided that you wish to learn it!

In general, Linux isn't that much faster than Windows, or DOS. The DOS
version of Quake ran about 10 fps faster under Windows 95 then under
Linux
(console) on a Pentium MMX 200MHz. So I don't believe that Linux runs
much
faster than Windows, or DOS.


Habil Silva

PS.: I don't read my mail very often, that's why I'm posting this reply
so
late.



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