Re: stuff running slowly

["Gregory M. Turner" <gmt@malth.us>]

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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