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Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:44:18 -0400
From: Michael Henry <cygwin AT drmikehenry DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, arnold AT skeeve DOT com
Subject: Re: stuff running slowly
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On 08/26/2012 04:03 AM, arnold AT skeeve DOT com wrote:
> Running
>
> ./configure && make && make check
>
> in the gawk master branch takes close to half an hour, maybe more! On
> simlar hardware under Linux, it takes less than a minute.

I've found on my hardware that launching a new process in
Windows is very slow compared with Linux.  With a Fedora 14 host
and a Windows 7 VM using VirtualBox, I measured process launch
times under 1 ms on Linux, but nearly 100 ms on Windows.  Both
configure and make rely heavily on launching processes during
the build.  In my case, it amounted to a 7-10 factor slowdown
when building a certain project at work.  I had similar problems
when trying to launch a Bash prompt under Cygwin, since shell
scripts tend to launch a lot of processes as well.

I don't believe this problem is caused by Cygwin, at least in my
case.  I measure the same terrible process launch times using
cmd.exe and a batch file, without any Cygwin tools running.  You
might try benchmarking process launch times on your Windows and
Linux setups to see if that might be underlying your problem.

I haven't determined whether this is inherently a problem with
Windows process launching, or if something I've got installed or
mis-configured might be causing the slowdown, so treat this as a
hint rather than as publication-quality conclusions to start an
OS war on Slashdot :-)

Michael Henry


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