John H Woods

UK

IT

I heard recently that some wags explain the inexplicable pauses in Microsoft computers as "Windows is helping you."

Running 'rm *' on a large directory on a unix box is pretty instant. But, to be fair, running 'del *.*' in the Windows command shell is, too. Pressing 'delete' when using the explorer GUI, however can leave you waiting several seconds before anything happens.

As a performance engineer, I find it fascinating and appalling. The number of times you find transactions that take astonishing amounts of time when (all) the hardware is reporting that it is not doing anything is amazing.

I wonder if the almost organic nature of complex networks can be to blame? On my particular network it sometimes takes _minutes_ to open a given network share. What's going on there?