ara.t.howard / noaa.gov wrote:
> on our machines copying files with FileUtils.cp_r is just as fast as 'cp
> -r' -
> very fast or slow disks seems to contraindicate benchmarks which do much
> io.
> that said, every real world problem tends to do lots of io.  ...ducks!
> 
> -a

And there's a black art tuning the Linux kernel memory manager to
optimize the tradeoffs between RAM for code and data, RAM for I/O
buffers and RAM for kernel tables. And I'm also guessing you've got
clustering and networking to balance as well.

It helps if you can afford a SAN with a huge cache, too. :) But, getting
back to CygWin, does anyone seriously use either CygWin or native
Windows servers in high-performance computing? I can't even imagine a
cluster of servers with a Windows 2003 or even XP Professional license
on each one, and the Windows license gets more expensive when you need
the 64-bit version.