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

The Hurd is currently slower than Linux, yes.

The main reason is *not* because of the overhead of RPCs. It's 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.