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[[!tag faq/general]]

[[!meta title="Is the Hurd slow?"]]

The Hurd is currently slower than Linux, yes. But not very much, so it is
completely usable.

Take care when running the Hurd in fully-virtualized machines: virtualization
software use ugly heuristics to make Linux run faster, which will not work on
the Hurd (or BSD, etc.) so comparisons in virtualized environments do not really
hold.

The main reason for slowness is *not* because of the overhead of RPCs. It's
mostly simply because less care has been done on implementing what makes Linux
fast: intelligent read-ahead, carefully-tuned page cache, etc.

There is no ground reason this can not be achieved on GNU/Hurd, it has just not
been a priority until now (first make it work, then make it work fast). We are
currently working on multi-page pager and read-ahead, which should improve this
a lot.