Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/03/05/11:11:10
Erik,
Cygwin's "terminal" I/O speed varies considerably depending on two
primary and independent choices: Console (Windows character subsystem)
vs. RXVT and CYGWIN with vs. without "tty".
In my home directory:
% find |wc -l
4681
% find -type d |wc -l
180
% find -type f |wc -l
4457
Console w/o CYGWIN=tty:
% time /bin/ls -lRF
real 0m17.703s
user 0m0.733s
sys 0m3.874s
Console w/ CYGWIN=tty
% time /bin/ls -lRF
real 0m37.150s
user 0m0.561s
sys 0m4.062s
RXVT w/o CYGWIN=tty
% time /bin/ls -lRF
real 0m4.964s
user 0m0.702s
sys 0m3.827s
RXVT w/ CYGWIN=tty
% time /bin/ls -lRF
real 0m4.864s
user 0m0.515s
sys 0m3.999s
I made several "priming" runs before capturing this timing information.
This test emphasizes scrolling speed, I believe. I think RXVT uses an
algorithm that skips ahead when large volumes of output are being
produced. This produces faster results (with the same end product on
the screen--it's just the scrolling that skips ahead) but the visual
appearance is discernibly less "continuous" than is the console mode.
So, if raw output speed as characterized by scrolling is the issue, use
RXVT. If your criteria are different (say, cursor addressing as
characterized by Emacs, Vim or Info), then I'd do some tests on your
own to find out what works best for you.
Note, too, that for some applications, most notably Emacs, you _must_
set the "tty" option in the CYGWIN environment variable. This maximizes
Unix tty compatibility. That option clearly imposes a much bigger
performance hit in the Windows console than in RXVT.
Randall Schulz
At 05:55 2003-03-05, Erik Vigmostad wrote:
>Is there some way to speedup the output to my terminal? I would like
>to use cygwin for ssh'g to various servers, but it is so much slower
>that using putty that I can't.
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