Cygwin suddenly prohibitively slow (conflicts?)

[Barnhart, Robert M.]

I have run Cygwin under Windows XP/Pro for years without noticeable problems. I am currently running :

"CYGWIN_NT-5.1 barnhartr 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin" on a Dell Lattitude 830 portable (2.5GHz Intel CoreDuo, 3.5GB RAM, 111GB disk).

Yesterday, cygwin was fine. Today, a bash window takes 30-60 seconds to startup, and simple commands (ls, man, ps, vi) take 10-30 seconds to start running. Once they start, they seem to run fine. For example "time ls -l" in my home directory (only 6 files and 5 directories) shows:

real    0m9.296s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.171s

Cygwin is the only reason I tolerate Windows but this performance renders it effectively useless.

I suspect a couple of things that might be affecting cygwin since yesterday:

1) I installed VMware Player 2.5.0 build-118166, but have not run it yet.
2) I loaded a VM image of about ~30GB onto my hard drive, but did not execute it.
3) Our company (SAIC) may be remotely installing Windows services, patches or even software IAW company policies. I can't necessarily  tell when this  is happening.

Are there any known problems with VMware and cygwin? 

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this crippling performance degradation?

Thanks,
Bob Barnhart
SAIC
barnhartr@saic.com
858.826.5596



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