Optimize cygwin on recent windows version (Vista and Seven)

Sisyphus sisyphus1@optusnet.com.au
Tue Jun 16 04:16:00 GMT 2009


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vincent R." <forumer@smartmobili.com>
To: <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:03 AM
Subject: Optimize cygwin on recent windows version (Vista and Seven)


> Hi,
>
> Until now I was using cygwin on Windows XP and I was satisfied by
> cygwin-1.7 but these last few days
> I switched to a more powerful laptop with very fast hardware (Core Duo 3.0
> Ghz and SSD OCZ Vertex)
> and running windows Seven.

I don't have Windows Seven - but I do have Windows Vista, which seems to be 
afflicted with the same crippling disabilities as Windows Seven, afaict.

> Now when I test cygwin, everything is so sloooooowww, I know this is not
> something new but do you plan
> to work on this issue ?

> Don't know if mingw could be one of them ?

I regularly build libraries using MinGW in the MSYS shell (by running 
'./configure', 'make', etc.).
I find this activity is a little quicker with MinGW/MSYS than with Cygwin.

However, the main problem seems to be the OS - and your best way of getting 
a reasonable performance for this type of activity is to stick with XP. 
(Maybe Win2K and earlier offer even better performance - I haven't checked.)

Here are some timings I did recently for building the mpc-0.6 library.
On Vista and XP, (in the same version of the MSYS shell, and using the same
version of MinGW's gcc) I ran:

./configure --disable-shared --enable-static CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib && make && make check

On linux (mdk-9.1) and cygwin, it was the same command, but without the 
CPPFLAGS and
LDFLAGS arguments (as they're not necessary on linux and cygwin).

Times taken were:
Linux : 1.5 mimutes
XP (mingw):  6.5 minutes
Vista (mingw): 16.5 minutes
Vista (cygwin): 23.25 minutes

In terms of processor capacity, the Vista box should be the fastest,
followed by the XP box, followed by the old Linux box, but clearly, OS
considerations are well and truly overwhelming those capacities. (If it were
just up to the processor speeds, then there wouldn't be a great difference,
anyway.)

I raised this on the MinGW list, and the feeling there was that there wasn't 
much that the MinGW folk could do about it. (I didn't present the cygwin 
timings to the MinGW list, as I've only just done them now.) One suggestion 
was to build the libraries on the linux box as a cross-compilation. Even for 
a small library like mpc it might be worth doing that way (assuming you have 
access to a linux box), and for something like gmp, which takes over an hour 
to build and test on Vista, it's definitely an appealing idea.

I don't have Cygwin on the XP laptop - but I assume it would perform the 
task more than twice as quickly on XP (as did MinGW/MSYS).

Cheers,
Rob 


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