Compile time Local Cygwin vs. VMware session on same system

[Ralph Hempel]

Manning, Sid wrote:
> I've been happily using cygwin for many years but I recently loaded
> VMware on my system and it seemed pretty snappy, so much so I decided
> to see how it compared to native execution.  I was surprised to see
> that I could compile much faster under VMware than on Cygwin on the
> same host.
> 
> I pasted a short script (bottom of message) that I hope one could
> just cut and run to verify my results.  To get a generally accessibly
> benchmark I download and time the compile binutils-2.18.
> 
> My initial results where so skewed that I downloaded an updated
> cygwin.dll (1.5.24.2 -> 1.5.25.2) but after the upgrade my
> performance dropped further.  Here are my results:

It looks like you're comparing compiling under Cygwin on the
host machine to compiling under Linux on a VMWare machine running
on the host and finding the second way faster.

If you pick up Mecklenburg's "Managing Projects with Make"
you'll find he does some timing tests comparing make running on
a 1.9 GHZ P4 running cygwin on XP vs make running on a 450 MHz
P2 running RedHat 9.

The (almost 4 times slower) P2 beat the P4 handily.

He attributes the difference mainly to the cost of launching
shells from make and general overhead of file operations in
Windows.

I'm not surprised that your VM running Linux is so much "faster"
than the host machine running Windows.

Long story short, this is probably not so much a Cygwin issue
as general Windows issue...

Cheers, Ralph

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