Subject: "ls" much slower on Vista
From: "John Cooper" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: "John Cooper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:27:05 +0100
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

I've recently installed Cygwin 1.5.24-2 on Windows Vista and found that
"ls" runs noticeably slower compared to WinXP or Win2K3 (same Cygwin
version) despite my Vista machine being newer, faster and having far
more memory (4Gb vs 1Gb on XP). 

The following numbers are from launching rxvt (from Start>Run) and then
running "time /bin/ls -l /usr/bin" (using similar sized rxvt windows,
not clipped):

Vista:
real    0m2.028s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m1.855s

XP:
real    0m0.250s
user    0m0.061s
sys     0m0.062s

That's over 2 seconds wall time on Vista for a full listing of /usr/bin,
versus a quarter of a second on XP. 

The number of files in /usr/bin is around about 400 in both cases. No
processes are using excessive CPU or hogging memory at the time of the
tests, which I've repeated numerous times and had similar results.

I actually use cygwin zsh and first noticed the slowdown there before
discovering it also affects /bin/sh.

Any ideas what might be causing the slowdown and how I might avoid it?

Thanks,

    --- John.

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