I came across a post discussing the speed of forking in Cygwin, giving an expected 'fork rate' in Windows XP of around 30-50 per-second (link)
I've got a Core 2 duo (1.79GHz) which I would expect to get comparable results, but it's only managing around 8 forks per second (and sometimes a lot fewer):
$ while (true); do date --utc; done | uniq -c
5 Wed Apr 21 12:38:10 UTC 2010
6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:11 UTC 2010
1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:12 UTC 2010
1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:13 UTC 2010
8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:14 UTC 2010
8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:15 UTC 2010
6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:16 UTC 2010
1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:18 UTC 2010
9 Wed Apr 21 12:38:19 UTC 2010
Can you suggest anything I might be able to do to speed things up? This machine acts a lot slower in Cygwin than others I've used before which actually were a lot slower.
Update
Let my justify my question: I don't believe that having a faster fork will magically make my life better, but I believe that this benchmark is a good proxy for the performance issues I'm seeing in bash due to normal use of external executables to calculate values. I find I get a noticeable speed up on Cygwin by going through my shell start up scripts and bash-completion and trying to replace external commands with internal ones; on Linux this isn't an issue. Often, though, this isn't possible, and my PC is currently taking ~14s to start a shell with a warm cache and no load.