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0 pointschasil19d ago0 comments

Well, Cygwin and Busybox have shown me that fork-heavy activities are about 100x slower on Windows than Linux.

The Windows approach may be correct, but it suffers in performance from the POSIX perspective.

I have heard that WSL1 iimproves this.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

amluto19d ago· 2 in thread

Linux has worked pretty hard to optimize fork(). This doesn’t mean that fork() is a good idea.

Windows does not historically depend on fork(), so there was no native fork(), so Cygwin kludged it up.

JdeBP19d ago

Actually, there is a native fork. There had to be, as POSIX personality support was a part of the Windows NT 3.1 design. What there wasn't was a Win32 form of fork. The Native API for Windows NT allowed it quite straightforwardly.

jkrejcha18d ago

Iirc Cygwin used to use it but iirc they moved away from it because they said that it was pretty slow

Though actually iirc werfault uses NtCreateUserProcess() to clone processes when writing out crash dumps to this day

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