Comparison of Interactivity Performance of Linux CFS and Windows 10 CPU Schedulers

Abstract

One of the main goals of a user-oriented operating system design is to ensure low response time of interactive tasks. Otherwise, high scheduling latencies will become obvious to the user and will in turn affect the user experience. One of the most popular benchmarks that can measure interactive tasks response time is Interbench. However, Interbench was only available in Linux, thus making interactivity performance benchmarking for other operating systems impossible. This research ported the Interbench to Windows operating system so that the interactive performance of Windows and Linux can be evaluated and compared. We studied the effect of various simulated workloads on interactive performance of both operating systems and concluded that the Linux CPU scheduler tends to have lower latencies than Windows 10 in most scenarios, except when a heavy background load is executed concurrently with heavy load interactive task.