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

Xah Lee, 2013-02-05

Here's 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 (http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-win32) 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.

Tech Detail

The Perl script validates local links of HTML files. https://github.com/xahlee/xahscripts/blob/master/validate_website/check_local_links.pl 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. ⁖ $inDirPath = "/cygdrive/c/Users/h3/web/";

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

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

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

◆ 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"