How Fast is Running Perl in Cygwin or Using NTFS on Linux? (The Price You Pay for Layers and Emulations)

By Xah Lee. Date: 2013-02-05. Last updated: 2020-05-10.

Here is a speed comparison of running a Perl script on Microsoft Windows vs Linux, using native vs non-native port, and using native vs non-native file system.

on Microsoft Windows, running Cygwin Perl in Cygwin terminal, using Microsoft Windows style input dir path (C:/) → 1080 seconds.
on Microsoft Windows, running Cygwin Perl in Cygwin terminal, using Unix style input dir path (/cygdrive/c/). → 55 seconds.
on Microsoft Windows, using Strawberry Perl (that's native Windows port of Perl) → 35 seconds.
on Linux, running it over files on Microsoft Windows file system NTFS → 300 seconds.
on Linux, running on Linux default file system (ext4) → 6 seconds.

Moral:

when running in Cygwin, using Windows style path can slow you down significantly.
running native port of Perl on Windows is almost twice faster than in Cygwin.
running NTSF on Linux may be 50 times slower than using Linux's native file system.

Don't Use Window Style Path in Cygwin

cygwin window path 2020-05-10 s8y43 — Cygwin window path http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-win32

Tech Detail

The Perl script validates local links of HTML files is at Perl: Validate Local Links

The script goes over 8.2k HTML files. Files that don't end in “.html” are skipped by regex. (there are a total of 23.3k files. 3.1 Giga bytes (lots image files))

----------
linux, everything native.
real    0m6.608s
user    0m5.844s
sys     0m0.448s

----------
Linux, over NTFS
real    8m11.333s
user    0m44.507s
sys     0m50.135s

----------
Strawberry Perl.

real 35s

----------
Cygwin Perl, using unix style dir path. For example, $inDirPath = "/cygdrive/c/Users/h3/web/";

real    0m55.175s
user    0m10.686s
sys     0m15.896s

----------
Cygwin Perl, using Windows style dir path. For example, $inDirPath = "c:/Users/h3/web";

real    18m34.533s
user    0m27.721s
sys     1m10.060s

My system info:

◆ uname -a
Linux xah-p6813w 3.2.0-37-generic-pae #58-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 24 15:51:02 UTC 2013 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
◆ xah@xah-p6813w◆ 2013-02-05 19:42 ◆ ~/web/xahlee_info/comp
◆ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS"