Subject: Re: slow handling of large sets of files?
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: Cygwin List <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 16:53:16 -0800

Ken Sheldon wrote:

> Not only Cygwin apps incur this large performance penalty.  Something
> similar happens with the cmd.exe prompt command "DIR", with the windows
> file explorer, or with IIS (FTP server).  This only seems to happen in
> the directory structures created by my CygWin scripts (using apps: tar,
> wget, cp)

If I had to take a wild guess I'd say that's because when a normal win32
app creates a file it usually inherits its ACL from the parent
directory, and presumably NTFS is tuned for this in some way so that
checking thousands of such files that all inherit ACLs is fast. 
However, when cygwin creates a file or dir it usually sets the
permissions explicitly to match what you would expect on a POSIX system
(i.e. 644 or 755.)  Try creating your files/folders with "nontsec" set
and see if the cygwin-created trees are as slow as native-created ones.

Brian

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