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Re: stuff running slowly


On 8/27/2012 11:28 PM, Aharon Robbins wrote:
Michael,

Thanks for your note. I understand that process creation on Windows
is slower than on Linux. But what I'm seeing is off by a few orders of
magnitude.  Cygwin on Windows 7 on a Sandy Bridge Core i5 with 4 Gig of
memory is PAINFULLY slower than even my 7 year old Power PC Macbook G4
running Mac OS X 10.5 with only .75 G of RAM.  Something is definitely
wrong.

The total

./bootstrap.sh && configure && make && make check

process takes close to 45 minutes!  On Linux, it takes under one minute.
On my Mac, under 5 minutes.

Short of "remove and reinstall", is there anything I should look for?

That's only one order of magnitude :P But I'm guessing that's small consolation.


There is one thing you can look for, and that's anything cluttering up your process creation, uh, process, so to speak.

BLODA apps (see http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.using.html#faq.using.bloda) are the likeliest culprits and also they will give you more grief later.

By extension, any software that wants to "hook APIs" by means of DLL "injection" hacks is going to cause problems (i.e.: I would guess, something like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, although I don't know if that's already a BLODA -- not singling that particular app out for any reason, just an example.)

If it "magically" changes the way Windows works, or if it is designed to prevent you from doing things (i.e.: video games, poker clients, etc, that have built-in anti-cheating rootkits), it probably is bad for cygwin.

Also possible is that rebasing your cygwin installation, cleanly, with no processes running, will allow cygwin to do less gymnastics and get better results.

At the end of the day, however, it may simply be that the particulars of the program you are trying to build are just not cygwin-friendly and you'll never get anywhere near the performance you want. Cross-compiling in an emulator might work better if you need it to go fast.

-gmt

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