I remember there was a period when there was a substantial performance
difference between windows and mac/linux. I experienced this
personally when I moved from rails 1.2 or so to a recent version on
windows (it became unbearably slow) and then switched to a mac when
the performance went back to 'normal' all with the same app.
I was wondering if anything has changed since then (2008) and if rails/
ruby is comparable performance wise on windows nowadays? A quick
search on the internet did not turn up anything past late 2008.
I run a Rails development environment on both a Windows machine and a
Linux VM running on the same machine. (I actually use the Linux VM
100% of the time now for Rails).
The Linux VM is much faster - RSpec tests run 3 to 4 times faster, as
do all rake tasks (again, running on a VM on the Windows machine).
Nothing has changed since 2008.
As I've posted before, I see no reason to develop on Windows,
especially since you can get the VMWarePlayer and a Linux image for
free.
I have never run a production environment on Windows so I don't have
hard numbers.
However, some basic testing of running my application in Windows vs
Linux does show that the Linux environment (hosted on a VM) serves up
the pages faster.
