Windows – Cygwin from Windows is very slow/ laggy

command linecygwin;windowswindows 7

Suddenly all Cygwin commands I start from the Windows command line have a ~10-20 second lag
before they execute, so that Cygwin becomes totally unusable. I already tried to reinstall without success.

Executing the commands from within a Bash shell window, works fine (while starting Bash I see the lag). Removing all entries from my local PATH variable doesn't have an influence. I use Windows 7 x64 and Cygwin x64 v 1.7.34 (0.285/5/3).

Best Answer

Occasionally I work in a Windows domain with thousands of users.

I don't want to do any best-guess approach. I would prefer Cygwin to cache user information on an as-needed basis. It turns out this is easy to do.

Simply run cygserver on login.

To set this up properly, run cygserver-config once only. This will set up cygserver to run as a Windows service with the correct credentials. Do this from an administrator Cygwin window.

$ cygserver-config
Generating /etc/cygserver.conf file

Warning: The following function requires administrator privileges!

Do you want to install cygserver as service?
(Say "no" if it's already installed as service) (yes/no) yes

The service has been installed under LocalSystem account.
To start it, call `net start cygserver' or `cygrunsrv -S cygserver'.

Further configuration options are available by editing the configuration
file /etc/cygserver.conf. Please read the inline information in that
file carefully. The best option for the start is to just leave it alone.

Basic Cygserver configuration finished. Have fun!

What does cygserver do for me?

Have a look at the documentation over at the Cygwin site. Basically it does the user caching stuff, together with ensuring IPC works between all Cygwin processes.

Your mileage may vary of course, but this is now my preferred way of working. I should have done it years ago.

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