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To: Win Smith who wrote (48943)	7/25/2001 12:18:20 PM
From: Milan Shah	Respond to of 275872

My impression is that the main problem with Win9x is the dumb old FAT file system. Yes, this is a huge part of the problem. The problem is not the FAT file system per-se, but the kernel interfaces to any file system - they are still largely interrupt based, just as in the old DOS OS. One consequence of this is that it is not possible to do IO in an async fashion - there is just no way to issue a read request to the disk and context switch away to a different context until the read request is complete. Another reason is that the whole kernel is non re-entrant - essentially meaning that the kernel has global variables which are modified when you call into the kernel, which forces you to wait until your call completes before you can make another call into the kernel. The exact same thing happens for network IO. Unfortunately, network IO can be unpredictable in its rate (hopefully, which makes the OS performance even more spotty - sometimes it appears things work just fine, and then it unpredictably freezes for a few seconds, then again things are fine.) They have tried to improve this situation over the years, (add special interfaces you can use under special circumstances) but there's only so much you can do. Milan