I'm setting up a laptop running a 64-bit install of Windows 7.  It has
an Intel i5 chip, which I think is not a slow processor.  I renamed
.bashrc and such to be out of the way to have as unmodified an
environment as I can think of.

$ time echo hello
hello

real    0m0.000s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

$ cp /dev/null frog
$ time cat frog

real    0m1.259s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.015s

# The next line has no effect - x is set in a subshell and thus lost.
# It's a contrived example just to show performance of a pipe purely,
# without extra delay due to forking programs.
$ time echo hello | read x

real    0m1.929s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.062s

I Googled a little, and a few messages suggest that forking new
processes has been slow in 64-bit mode for a year or two.

Have I done something to screw up performance?  Is there anything I
can do?  Or is this indeed intrinsic to Cygwin, and is there any
prospect of fixing this soon?

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com