Terminals like mintty and rxvt are doing an unusual amount of context
switching and consuming a lot of CPU cycles even in idle time. Process
Explorer suggests that this activity is largely attributable to
"cygwin1.dll!setprogname". Could this be something that should not or
need not be done? (Running cygwin.bat directly to use Cygwin doesn't
show such activity.)
Most recently I've been seeing this behavior with Mintty v0.97, Cygwin
v1.7.9-1, Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (x64, Build Version: 6.1.7601 Service
Pack 1 Build 7601). However I've noticed this in a few older versions
of Mintty, Cygwin as well, even on Windows XP.
You can also view the mintty thread where this discussion began:
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=265