stuff running slowly

stuff running slowly

[arnold]

Hi.  Please cc me on any answers, as I am not subscribed to the list.

I have a recent (a few weeeks old) cygwin install on my Win 7 laptop
Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) + an SSD.

When I first did the install I thought I saw a performance improvement
over the ~ 1 year old install I had.  In the past two weeks though, it
has slowed way down.  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 had to disable the bash_completion stuff at startup to even get a
shell prompt within a reasonable amount of time.

Clerly something is wrong somewhere, but I'm not a Windows god so I
have no idea where to look.

Any and all suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
(Gawk maintainer)

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Re: stuff running slowly

[Michael Henry]

On 08/26/2012 04:03 AM, arnold@skeeve.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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Re: stuff running slowly

[Aharon Robbins]

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?

Thanks,

Arnold

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Re: stuff running slowly

[Gregory M. Turner]

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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RE: stuff running slowly

[James Johnston]

> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 07:09
> Cc: Aharon Robbins
> Subject: 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.
> 

I'd also look into this.  I've personally seen a case where process creation
took about 0.5 seconds (!!); uninstalling the anti-virus fixed the problem.
Note that this slow process-creation was not Cygwin-specific; it was
actually affecting every process on the machine.


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Re: stuff running slowly

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi. Just a note to say "THANK YOU" to everyone who took the time to
reply to me.  I hope that a blanket thanks will do. :-)

I've come to the conclusion that it is indeed BLODA. The box in
question is my Corporate IT Laptop With All The Mandated Software and
I can't disable anti-virus or any of the other stuff (like the automatic
screensaver) lest the sky fall and cats start mating with dogs and so on.

However, on a different Windows box without all the stuff a fresh install
runs much more normally, so I will just use that for my testing.

(36 *minutes* for 'make check' !!!  Sheesh.)

Thanks,

Arnold

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Re: stuff running slowly

[Earnie Boyd]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> Hi. Just a note to say "THANK YOU" to everyone who took the time to
> reply to me.  I hope that a blanket thanks will do. :-)
>
> I've come to the conclusion that it is indeed BLODA. The box in
> question is my Corporate IT Laptop With All The Mandated Software and
> I can't disable anti-virus or any of the other stuff (like the automatic
> screensaver) lest the sky fall and cats start mating with dogs and so on.
>

Are you at least able to add to the exclude list in the anti-virus
software?  My corporation at least allows me to do that since I'm in
IT.

> However, on a different Windows box without all the stuff a fresh install
> runs much more normally, so I will just use that for my testing.
>
> (36 *minutes* for 'make check' !!!  Sheesh.)

I expect this to be a result of the anti-virus trying to check each
file that is created.  It gets most of the CPU time and slows down the
process.

-- 
Earnie
-- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd

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Re: stuff running slowly

[Achim Gratz]

Aharon Robbins writes:
> I've come to the conclusion that it is indeed BLODA. The box in
> question is my Corporate IT Laptop With All The Mandated Software and
> I can't disable anti-virus or any of the other stuff (like the automatic
> screensaver) lest the sky fall and cats start mating with dogs and so on.

Been there, done that… I can feel your pain.  While corporate IT will
surely not let you de-install or even de-activate any of their favorite
bloatware, they usually can be coerced into adding another directory
that is exempted from the real-time antivirus scans or you could install
Cygwin into a path they've added an exemption for already.


Regards,
Achim.
-- 
+<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+

Samples for the Waldorf Blofeld:
http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#BlofeldSamplesExtra


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Re: stuff running slowly

[marco atzeri]

On 8/26/2012 10:03 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Hi.  Please cc me on any answers, as I am not subscribed to the list.
>
> I have a recent (a few weeeks old) cygwin install on my Win 7 laptop
> Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) + an SSD.
>
> When I first did the install I thought I saw a performance improvement
> over the ~ 1 year old install I had.  In the past two weeks though, it
> has slowed way down.  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 had to disable the bash_completion stuff at startup to even get a
> shell prompt within a reasonable amount of time.
>
> Clerly something is wrong somewhere, but I'm not a Windows god so I
> have no idea where to look.
>
> Any and all suggestions will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold Robbins
> (Gawk maintainer)

Arnold,
on a not very fast laptop, using the last source package I have:

$ time cygport gawk-4.0.1-1.cygport compile

real    2m59.539s
user    1m52.266s
sys     1m34.082s

$ time cygport gawk-4.0.1-1.cygport check

real    1m53.997s
user    0m25.064s
sys     1m3.221s

so it seems a specific issue on your machine.

Likely some type of
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.using.html#faq.using.bloda
usually an antivirus one....

see also
http://cygwin.com/problems.html

Regards
Marco


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