Subject: RE: "ls" much slower on Vista
From: "John Cooper" <[email-masked]>
To: "Steven Hartland" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
Cc: "John Cooper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:58:18 +0100
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

Thanks for the pointer - it turns out Symantec AntiVirus is the culprit.

If I disable "File System Auto-Protect" then "time /bin/ls -l /usr/bin"
goes down from 2 seconds to about 0.3s, which is now perfectly usable.
Oddly, I also have Symantec AntiVirus on my WinXP machine where
performance is far better. However, this is an older version of the
AntiVirus software which refuses to upgrade via LiveUpdate, so I'm not
sure if the massive AntiVirus slowdown is due to the later version or
the fact that it's running on Vista.

Interestingly, though, "time cmd /c dir" on Vista is much less affected
by the AntiVirus software - when enabled the time is 0.18s, and when
disabled 0.10s. So I guess cygwin "ls -l" is doing many more file system
operations than "dir".

The following page indicates that virus checkers can make disk access
over 2000% slower:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html

    --- John.

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Hartland [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 25 October 2007 02:01
To: John Cooper; [email-masked]
Cc: John Cooper
Subject: Re: "ls" much slower on Vista

Do you have any antivirus on the Vista machine?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Cooper" 

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

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