Cygwin is VERY slow now

[John R Lyon]

Hello Igor -

Another reader pointed me to an MS knowledge base article that 
acknowledges the slowdown after the hotfix is installed. They've removed 
the hotfix for now until they can fix it. I'd searched their knowledge 
base for "slow performance" articles prior to posting my message but did 
not find the one I was directed to.

With the hotfix, EVERYTHING in Cygwin was slow, even "ls" in a 6-file 
directory.

I won't be reinstalling the hotfix till it's fixed :-)

- Jack

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Thu, 1 May 2003, John R Lyon wrote:
> 
> 
>>Lately, as I've read in some other messages, Cygwin seems painfully
>>slow. However, I have this observation: "It is slow only on an updated
>>version of Windows XP".
>>
>>I have Cygwin installed on the Windows 2000 machine I use at work and
>>updated installations have continued to operate at normal speed. My most
>>recent update of Cygwin was today (May 1).
>>
>>I have virtually identical installations on a Windows XP desktop and an
>>XP laptop. They are also up to date and they are so slow that they are
>>almost unusable. I first noticed the slowdown sometime last week. I DO
>>NOT have the dreaded "//c" notation in my PATH.
>>
>>I tried disabling the virus checker and saw no improvement.
>>
>>My conclusion from all of this is that a recent Windows update was the
>>culprit. To check this out, I just uninstalled the latest hotfix
>>"Q8114993" from my laptop. To my considerable surprise, the laptop's
>>version of Cygwin is now back to its original (fast) speed!
>>
>>Hope this helps someone and it would be nice to figure out a workaround
>>since it's good to keep Windows up to date.
>>- Jack
> 
> 
> Jack,
> 
> If there is a short-running command (e.g., ls, cp, id) that gets
> noticeably slower after the hotfix, an interesting piece of data would be
> the output of strace on that command, both with and without the hotfix.
> That would show where the time is going upon installing the hotfix.  One
> possibility that's been reported is the gethostname() call, since Cygwin
> just leverages winsock's implementation, and the hotfix might have changed
> that.  There may be others.  The strace output would be a good start,
> though.
> 	Igor



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