Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 11/15/09 wrote:
---------------------------
>Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto@gmail.com) on 11/14/09 wrote:
>>It's certainly because of fork() and friends. The implementation is incredibly
>>inefficient, unfortunately it's the only way to do it on Windows and GNU/make makes
>>plenty use of those calls.
>
>I don't believe fork() has anything to do with it.
>To be clear, I am talking about slowness in the case where nothing or almost nothing
>has to be recompiled. So I'd expect that the only forks executed are forks of make
>itself for recursive processing of directories. So, since there are less than 20
>directories there would be less than 20 forks. As slow as they are 20 forks can't take several seconds.

The number of forks 'make' makes is *not* in direct relation to the number of directories. Try "strace -c -f make". Though, I do not know whether 'strace' works in Cygwin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strace says that it somehow does work).