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Asked: 2026-05-31T02:36:14+00:00

I have a c++ program which takes really long time to run in cygwin

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I have a c++ program which takes really long time to run in cygwin versus quick turnaround on a linux machine. I thought it could be a memory issue and tried to print the memory used and this is waht I see:

Linux

virtual memory: 5072 KB, Resident set size (RSS) : 1064 KB

Cygwin

virtual memory: 7672 KB, Resident set size (RSS) : 108928 KB

Can anyone help me understand what causes this difference? The cygwin is running on a laptop with 64-bit windows & and 3 GB memory. There is some old “C” code which does malloc in the program. Would converting these to standard c++ containers help?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Cygwin provides a POSIX compatibility layer on to of Windows. That is bound to be slower than code built against the native OS CRT.

    If your code is Standard C or C++, recompile it with MSVC or MinGW/GCC and then compare it.

    On another note, malloc vs new is a non-issue. Heap allocation is expensive.

    What might be important is that Windows heap allocation is in general more expensive than Linux’ implementation. The effect of this difference depends on your code.

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