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I have a machine setup to share c:\apps. I then map the share to drive letter Z: on the same machine. Would an application running from the Z:\ drive run slower than if I ran it from C:\apps? If so, how much?

In other words, would it run slower because it has to go through the network when running from drive Z:? Or is it smart enough to bypass the network and just access the C: drive?

3 Answers 3

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Assuming any fairly recent version of Windows, you shouldn't see any performance difference; modern versions of Windows are generally smart enough to short-circuit unnecessary trips to the network.

Of course, you could always benchmark it and see for sure.

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On Windows XP SP3, the performance difference was very large. The git log command was 4x slower in my benchmarks.

On Windows 10 (20H2), I see a much more manageable 15% performance penalty.

I would still recommend using the subst command instead:

subst z: c:\some\longer\path
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  • I did this same test a handful of times on Windows 10; anecdotally, it looks like using a network path was consistently a few milliseconds more, but always the difference was always less than .01.
    – Tahlor
    Dec 29, 2020 at 8:19
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    So, retesting this almost 10 years later, this time on Windows 10, I see a 15% penalty with git log on a large git repository. Feb 19, 2021 at 16:52
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Network share will be accessed through local loopback interface (127.0.0.1). I'm not sure about performance implication, probably negligible, may be higher CPU load. But you will be accessing it as a network user. So if you have read-only share you will not be able to write to it. However you can write to the same folder when accessing it through the file system.

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