Re: Two strange messages while building Emacs on MS-Windows

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> How did you time things on Windows?

>From a MSYS bash shell:

time <command>


Your reports motivated me to do more research. Booted again the machine
with the XP partition with the intention of timing with other methods.
The first try was with MSYS again, just a sanity check, and this is the
result for the second and successive runs:

time /c/apps/emacs/bin/emacs --batch --eval '(message "Hello")'

0.047 s

I can only speculate about what happened. That XP partition was used by
the first time on about two years for the timings I posted the first
time you asked for data. This last time I booted XP it was idle for
several minutes before I ran the tests. Maybe the first time Windows
Update or other background programs were doing their chores, although
Task Manager didn't show significant activity.

The timings I originally posted seemed right because they were about 10%
better than the ones I get on the virtualized XP machine I use for
building Emacs. Now I'm surprised to see how big the performance penalty
virtualization imposes on some tasks. (Now I recall that long time ago I
did quite a bit of experimentation and observed that the overhead is
less if you assign just one CPU to the virtual machine.)