Solved: Cygwin Speed Issue

While writing my previous post on Getting Started with Cygwin I was slightly perturbed to discover that my brand-new Cygwin installation was running pretty slowly. Even simple commands like ls or cd were taking up to 10 seconds to run.

After doing a bit of digging I came across a very simple solution in the Cygwin mailing list archives – I had a reference in my Windows PATH variable to a network drive that was unavailable.

To check this, right click on My Computer, and go to Properties. Go to Advanced, and then Environment Variables:

In System Variables find PATH:

Click on Edit, and copy and paste the entire string into your favourite text editor (in my case Notepad++, but Notepad will do, or vim):

In this case the offending entry was U:\scripts – the U:\ drive was only available part of the time. Removing this, pasting it all back into the PATH variable and then clicking OK instantly sped up Cygwin.