On 10/29/2021 11:44 AM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
AIUI it's a fundamental part of the trade-offs that NTFS makes: compared to common Linux file systems like ext4, NTFS is much slower at things like parsing directory structures (which is a necessary part of opening any given file). In the same way that native Windows programs tend to use threading implementations that work differently to fork(), native Windows applications will also often much prefer large monolithic data files, where native *nix applications are much more likely to have lots of small files. As a result, for things that require opening lots of files, WSL (at least if you're using the native WSL disk, which will be a *nix disk image stored in a file, rather than files under /mnt/c or similar) will likely be quicker than a similar operation through Cygwin, as Cygwin will always be affected by those NTFS overheads.
Ah, that's interesting. The files in question, that seem to be opened (and *maybe* read) faster are in the *nix hierarchy, while my book files are all in Windows (/mnt/c on WSL1). So the huge speedup reading those makes sense. The speedup processing the rest still doesn't quite make sense, unless maybe WSL1's parsed-directory caching is more effective than Cygwin's or something. (I assume something like that is going on, to reduce conversions of directories to *nix format.) Regards - Eliot -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
