The solution seems to be to cache the user info locally instead of it having to query the domain controller everytime.

Ah yes: here’s a better expressed post: http://bjg.io/guide/cygwin-ad/

I did the following

• commented out the “db” part for passwd and group in c:/msys64/etc/nsswitch.conf, to give this:

# Begin /etc/nsswitch.conf

passwd: files #db

group: files #db

db_enum: cache builtin

db_home: windows

db_shell: cygwin desc

db_gecos: cygwin desc

# End /etc/nsswitch.conf

• Note that I also set db_home to ‘windows’, so that it gets my windows home directory.  I think an explicit path would also be OK
• However I discovered that having just “files” for “passwd” in nsswitch.conf means that ssh looks in c:/msys64/etc/passwd to find the home directory for .ssh, totally ignoring the $HOME environment variable, and ignoring the db_home setting.
• But there IS no /etc/passwd file!   So I created one

mkpasswd -c > /etc/passwd

mkgroup -c > /etc/group

And then I manually edited /etc/passwd to put in the correct home directory.

What a saga!

Is it faster now?  Hard to tell.

Simon

From: Phyx <lonetiger@gmail.com>
Sent: 03 April 2018 07:00
To: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com>
Cc: ghc-devs@haskell.org
Subject: Re: More windows

Hi Simon, 

Hmm I'm not sure about replacing sh with bash. I think bash has some Non-POSIX extensions that may affect the behavior of valid posix scripts. 

Is bash --login slow as well? How about once sh or bash starts, are commands still slow then? 

I assume your computer is domain joined and you may be hitting a very long standing issue with certain domain joined machines https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/138#issuecomment-70813762

The solution seems to be to cache the user info locally instead of it having to query the domain controller everytime. See solution 2 here 
https://gist.github.com/k-takata/9b8d143f0f3fef5abdab for instructions 

Does that help the problem? 

I believe you had a similar problem last time setting up a new machine. At that time magit was also slow. 

Kind regards, 

Tamar 

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018, 23:23 Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:

Tamar

I’ve noticed that “sh” (which is invoked at lot by make etc) takes AGES to start up.  At least I think it’s ‘sh’ that is causing the delay.

I think it’s c:/msys64/usr/bin/sh.exe

From searching the web (eg https://www2.cs.duke.edu/csl/docs/unix_course/intro-60.html)  it seems likely that it executes c:/msys64/etc/profile first.

And If I put an ‘echo’ at the start and end of that file, they do seem to take place with a significant gap between them.

I have not started sprinkling more echos, but does that ring any bells?

Can I replace ‘sh’ with c:/msys64/usr/bin/bash.exe, which seems to be faster?   (My evnt variable SHELL already points to bash.exe. )  And if so, how would I do that? An environment variable.  Physically copy bash.exe to sh.exe?  Or what?

Thanks

Simon