title: Why do insertions and deletes take over 100 times longer on windows 7 than Mac 10.9?
body: <p>I wrote a script to benchmark insertions and deletes.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import os, time
  
  abspath =  os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
  dbname = 'test.sqlite'
  # dbname = ':memory:'
  
  databaseFileName = os.path.join(abspath, dbname)
  if os.path.exists(databaseFileName):
      os.remove(databaseFileName)
  
  
  from sqlalchemy import \
      Table, Column, MetaData, create_engine,\
      Integer, DateTime
  engine = create_engine('sqlite:///' + dbname)
  
  metadata = MetaData()
  test = Table ('test', metadata,
      Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True)
  )
  metadata.create_all(engine)
  
  conn = engine.connect()
  
  numRecords = 100
  
  start = time.clock()
  for i in range(numRecords):
      conn.execute(test.insert())
  print 'It took %s seconds to insert %s records' % ((time.clock() - start), numRecords)
  
  start = time.clock()
  for i in range(1, numRecords+1):
      conn.execute(test.delete().where(test.c.id == i))
  print 'It took %s seconds to delete %s records' % ((time.clock() - start), numRecords)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On Windows it printed</p>
  
  <pre><code>It took 5.32831616059 seconds to insert 100 records
  It took 6.76065831351 seconds to delete 100 records
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On Mac it printed</p>
  
  <pre><code>It took 0.036788 seconds to insert 100 records
  It took 0.041629 seconds to delete 100 records
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why is it so much faster on Mac?  Is it because Mac uses HFS+ and Windows uses NTFS?</p>