GNU Make performance question

[Robert Mecklenburg]

I am writing a document on the performance of gnu make and various
makefiles and came across something I can't explain.

To measure the speed of gnu make $(subst...) versus sed I wrote this
simple makefile:

  p1000 := ...<1000 character string with periodic semicolons>...
  # This simple assignment 10000 times.
  x := $(subst ;, ,$(p1000))
  ...

I then run this makefile 10 times and average the times.  I ran the
makefile on Windows XP with Cygwin and a Linux system with RedHat 9:

  Windows XP     1.8 GHz/P4/512MB	 82644 assignments / second
  Linux	  	 450 MHz/P2/256MB	111111 assignments / second

As you can see the puny 450 MHz P2 managed to kick Windows ass.  I'm
at a total loss to explain why, though.  For instance,

* Both systems were idle, with no memory hogging apps running (the
  Windows machine was freshly booted)

* The test runs the makefile only 10 times, for only 10 process
  create/loads and 100000 assignments

* The test seems to be entirely cpu bound, with both executables
  compiled by gcc (albeit different versions)

Could this be entirely explained by the difference in process creation
times?  I would have thought that the 4 times clock rate and beefier
ram would have adequately compensated.

Note, this is not - in any way - a complaint about performance.  I'd
just like to understand the reasons.

Thanks,
Robert


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