Notable performance improvement in 64-bit build

[Ivan Todoroski <ivan at todoroski dot com>]

Hello everyone,

I'm just curious, has there been any special focus on performance
improvements in the 64-bit version compared to 32-bit?

I'm asking because I recently upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit Cygwin, and I
noticed that my bash prompt would show up noticeably quicker when I opened a
new Cygwin shell (I have a rather complicated ~/.profile script, so the
delay is actually visible to the eye).

At first I thought it was just some sort of placebo effect and I was
imagining it, but the effect seemed so persistent that I just had to perform
some measurements.

What I found was that under 32-bit Cygwin my ~/.profile script is executed
in 507ms (average of 30 runs), but under 64-bit Cygwin the exact same script
gets executed in 376ms (again, 30-run average). Both measurements were done
on the same machine with 32-bit and 64-bit Cygwin installed side by side
(both freshly updated to their latest respective versions).

That's a whopping 33% performance improvement!

So I was just curious if anyone had any speculations on what exactly might
have caused this performance increase. :)

In any case, kudos to the Cygwin developers, great job on the 64-bit build!


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