Slow/sluggish response ("system" task at 50%)

[Gene Smith]

Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> Gene Smith wrote:
>> Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote, On 06/22/2009 08:08 PM:
>>>
>>> There's also 1.7 - <http://cygwin.com/#beta-test>
>>>
>>
>> 1.7 seems to fix it. It now takes 34 seconds as compared to 14 minutes 
>> with cygwin-1.5. (But I suspect that a fresh install of 1.5 might 
>> produce similar or better results.)
>>
>> At some point, 1.5 started getting slow for me. I don't know (yet) 
>> what caused it. I still have the conflict with winavr using 1.7 so I 
>> don't think that is it.
>>
>> Someone on a list mention about "home directory" affecting cygwin 
>> speed. I do notice that on 1.7-beta $HOME is /home/smited (under 
>> c:\cygwin-1.7\). While on my 1.5 $HOME is /cygdrive/c/Documents and 
>> Settings/smited. Somehow 1.5 points $HOME to the existing windows 
>> "home" while 1.7 points $HOME to a new and almost empty directory 
>> under c:\cygwin-1.7. Does this matter at all?
> 
> Depends on how much "cruft" has built up in your "Windows" home directory.
> While this does get pretty "trashy" IMO, I don't think the typical build-up
> of Windows junk there would seriously impact performance, unless this
> somehow became a network directory reference at some point.  And I think
> if just pointing at the home directory Windows uses were a general issue,
> we'd hear allot more about it on this list.  But I can't say for sure
> something in your case isn't causing the problem you were seeing.
> I suppose if you're real curious about it, you can try pointing your
> new 1.7 install to it and see if things revert to the nostalgic slow-boat
> that you've become accustomed to. ;-)
> 

Since I don't have a "HOME" env var in windows, cygwin is getting the 
cygwin HOME from /etc/passwd. So I tried it both ways. With 1.5 I set 
home to be the empty directory /home/smited (under c:/cygwin). It didn't 
make it any faster. With beta-1.7 I set home to /cygdrive/c/Documents 
and Settings/smited (where all the cruft is) and it didn't make it any 
slower. So where cygwin points $HOME at terminal startup does not seem 
to have an effect for me. Current version 1.5 is slow while beta-1.7 is 
fast, for still unknown reasons.


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