Observation: setting HOME to "/" can lead to slow cygwin

[George Wyner <gwyner at computer dot org>]

I am running Cygwin 1.5.25 on Windows XP Professional (Ver 5.1 Build 
2600 Service Pack 2)

No longer sure why, but at some point I set my HOME directory to C:\cygwin

Running cygwin on my machine was quite slow, especially when starting 
bash and running man and info (2-5 seconds for each).  I also noticed 
that nano complained it could not find the file "//.nanorc"

I changed the home directory in my passwd file to /home/gwyner at 
which point the slowdown vanished:  bash, man, and info are now 
fast.  the nano error also went away.

End of observation.

Start of uninformed speculation:

I suspect that this is a variation on the network share cause of 
slowdown reported in the FAQ 
(http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.using.html#faq.using.slow) -- I suspect 
that because HOME was set to "/" that directory references beginning 
with the prefix $HOME/ would resolve to // and therefore be 
interpreted as a network share.

It may be that "//" showed up somewhere in my environment and I did 
not see it (although I looked) but if that is not so then it might be 
worth flagging the above configuration as another potential source of 
problems.  (Perhaps more likely with windozy users like me who may 
not have the right intuitions or knowledge about where to put the 
home directory.)

--George Wyner


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