Comment by chubot
8 years ago
Yeah the time it takes is really mind-boggling if you think about it. I recently had occasion to run Windows XP in a VirtualBox on fairly underpowered Macbook Air.
It not only installed really fast, but at runtime it was fast and responsive! And so were the apps! Virtualbox recommends 192 MB of RAM for Windows XP, and it works fine. Amazing. Remember when everyone said Windows was slow and bloated?
On the other hand, I tried compiling Python 2.7 on a Raspberry Pi Zero, which is probably around as fast as the machines at the time of XP (maybe a little slower). This was not a fun experience!
Actually I just looked it up, and the Pi Zero has 512 MB of RAM. So in that respect it has more power. Not sure about the CPU though... I think I ran Windows XP on 300 Mhz computers, but I don't remember. Pi Zero is 700 Mhz, but you can't compare clock rates across architectures. I think they're probably similar though.
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FWIW I think importing is heavily bottlenecked by I/O, in particular stat() of tons of "useless" files. In theory the C to Python change shouldn't have affected it much. But I haven't looked into it more deeply than that.
IIRC the foundation originally compared the RPi's CPU to a Pentium II running at 266 MHz, which seems about right to me.
IME/IMB startup is almost always CPU bound (to a single CPU thread, of course). Note that the Linux kernel also caches negative dent lookups, so these "is there something here?" stat()s will stay in the dentry cache.