[GRASSLIST:436] Re: Cygwin Performance vs. Linux

[Glynn Clements]

David Finlayson wrote:

> My question is this: am I better off running the cygwin version of grass 
> on the hot Windows machines, or running it on the slower Linux machine 
> (and loosing that cool Libranet desktop in the process)?

There is a performance penalty for using Cygwin, but I doubt that it
would typically amount to a 4:1 ratio (i.e. making a 2GHz Cygwin
system slower than a 500MHz Linux system).

By far the biggest performance hit with Cygwin is spawning commands
(i.e. fork/exec; this is easily 20x slower on Cygwin than on a "real"
Unix such as Linux or *BSD). File I/O shouldn't be much slower than on
Linux, and there shouldn't be any difference for actual computation.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>