If you've been paying attention to the various industry news outlets you've no doubt come across the story about the Microsoft engineer advocating Windows Server 2008 as a "workstation" OS. According to him, if you make the right tweaks - installing the Desktop Experience feature, adding a few missing utilities, tuning the scheduler - you can turn Server 2008 into a fairly convincing Vista knock-off, one that's faster and more scalable than the original.
Curious, we decided to see for ourselves just how well Server 2008 stacks-up to Vista with Service Pack 1. To make the comparison as even as possible, we disabled all of the UI goodies on Vista (i.e. set the Visual Effects to "Adjust for Best Performance") and installed the Desktop Experience feature under Server 2008. We also enabled SuperFetch and the Indexing services on the Server 2008 installation (both are disabled by default) and adjusted the "Processor scheduling" option to favor Programs (i.e. the way it's set under Windows Vista).
For hardware, we reused our Dell XPS M1710 test bed (Core 2 Duo T7200 at 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB 7200RPM disk) from our previous Vista testing projects. Both OS were configured to use the entire disk as a single partition, and we installed the same device drivers under each version.
The actual test scenarios involved a straight execution of the OfficeBench test script (in a 10-iteration loop) as well as a separate multi-process workload package featuring the ADO, MAPI and WMP Stress workload generation objects (executing continuously for 10 minutes in a 3x3x3 multi-instance configuration).
Given all the press surrounding Vista Service Pack 1 and the supposed parity of the SP1 and Server 2008 kernels, we were expecting to find little or no performance delta between the two platforms. So we were understandably surprised when repeated test runs showed Windows Server 2008 outperforming Windows Vista w/SP1 by a margin of 11-17%.
Clearly, there is more going on within Server 2008 than simply a few boot-time kernel switches. The very tangible performance disparity between our "Workstation" 2008 configuration and Vista, even with Service Pack 1 installed, shows that Microsoft is capable of squeezing more out of the shared "Windows 6.1" code base if/when they choose to do so.
As for what's dragging Vista down (the number of running processes and services was nearly identical across both OS and in each test scenario), that's a bit harder to define. Perhaps the Server 2008 team decided to eschew some of the more desktop-centric and/or consumer-focused (i.e. CPU cycle-sapping) features of the Vista core (DRM comes to mind). Regardless, now that we know how much better things could have been, it'll be that much harder to settle for the sluggishness and bloat of Windows Vista.
Our recommendation: If you have an MSDN account or otherwise have access to a Server 2008 license, check it out for yourself. You may find that Windows "Workstation" 2008 is the Windows Vista you've been waiting for all along.
27 comments:
It would have been nice to see some graphics performance results. ZBrush, Maya, rendering, and Direct X development, all come to mind when I think of "workstations". So how about it?
Even using the betas of Server 2008 I could notice the improved performance over Vista. I thought SP1 would bring the performance up to the same level, but it doesn't seem too.
Disabling DRM would give a 30%+ performance boost imho.
10% is akin to them fixing their Direct2D toolkit to Direct3D translation engine to use hardware instead of software rendering emulation. Maybe everything they draw per default in vista in 2D is now native 3D?
Either way, its nice to see that m$ now has a fantastic reason to say 'go buy the $2000 version of our O/S, your games will run 10% quicker!'
Does Server 2008 support protected media playback? Just wondering what the differences are.
This makes me want to run Server 2008... but then I realized that there aren't any Server 2008 drivers for Compal GL31 hardware.
I want to run XP...
I would actually like to see the tests without doing ANY of the desktop tuning for 2008 - just a vanilla install. Curious to see how much all the desktop "features" hurt performance.
D
OS X on my intel box is far faster than Vista and a 11-17% increase still wouldn't catch it... unless I have to dev something in .NET for work, I am ALWAYS in OS X... Vista cannot compare.
Thanks for your efforts. For more clarity, don't use 3D bar charts. It is almost impossible to figure out where the top of the bar is on a 3D bar chart. (Hint, look at where the base is compared to 0.)
Tremendous Vista performance improvements can be achieved by using Vlite which is price-wise (and I bet performance-wise too) a much better alternative to using a server OS to the end-user.
@OS X Fanboy: Realy? on my Mac ( 2,4 core2duo) it loads 10 times slower!!!Why you lie like this?
@anonymous: You da liar. And you're dumb.
I don't have a problem with Vista's performance as it is today, of course I buy reasonably fast hardware and I am not a performance tweaker..
Gotta love that the comments were all thoughtful and comparative until some fanboy walks in and talks up his Mac.
Macs cause violence and smugness. You pay a $100-400 dollar premium for being able to be smug and smell someone else's farts (your farts don't smell as nice a Steve Jobs).
On that note, I have to confess that I have respect for Jobs, so the fart bit isn't a dig at him. Just his legions.
Just as Windows Server 2003 (aka Windows Workstation 2003 when configured like this blog is talking about with 2K8) was and still remains probably the fastest OS Microsoft has put out in a long long time. 2K8 is fast, but on the same hardware, 2K3 is still faster.
Even so, it's nice to see people coming to realize that 'server' operating systems do most everything better.
This is just absurd. Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 are exactly the same code (except, obviously, for the server-only components).
Compare the damn binaries yourself, and stop making ridiculous claims like this.
I was just wondering if you followed benchmarking best practices regarding SuperFetch:
Measuring Performance in Windows Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Vista_perf.mspx
If not your test isn't very useful.
Cheers!
Daniel
You don't need MDSN accoutn or anything for checking out 2008. Just go to www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008 and click on "Trial". Its open for everyone.
xerces8
Brandon Park, stop being a dumb-ass. They're just posting results, not making wild claims.
P.S. I say bring on the Mac comments!
"Just as Windows Server 2003 (aka Windows Workstation 2003 when configured like this blog is talking about with 2K8) was and still remains probably the fastest OS Microsoft has put out in a long long time. 2K8 is fast, but on the same hardware, 2K3 is still faster."
However, note that the performance gap between XP and Server 2003 is probably much smaller, because it is less modular than Vista/Server 2008.
"Disabling DRM would give a 30%+ performance boost imho."
How, exactly? Be precise.
Vista is better technologie. The system is more stable. Mircosoft supported the product longer.
Ok Jokes over where is my copy of ME...
WOW!. I took the plunge last night and 2008 is absolutely fantastic.
I did not expect it to be such a marked difference from Vista x64 SP1.
This thing feels like a totally different OS. Not exaggerating.
Try it peeps. It is worth the effort.
I'm willing to bet that the difference you see is due to the "Previous Versions" feature. It's enabled by default on Vista but disabled on Server. Vista SP1 and 2K8 are based on the same codebase so there shouldn't be any marked difference in how they behave internally.
Here's a detailed bench of 2008 vs Vista vs XP, 32-bit vs 64-bit:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=242891
Vista x64 with SP1 is a fantastic system from MS. The support is very important.
Due to safety-problems we run Linux (Suse) on our server.
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