Startup is really slow for all Cygwin applications

Question

Start of any Cygwin application takes more than a minute on Windows 8.1 x64. It doesn\'t matter, either I\'m starting mintty from shortcut or

Answer 1

Here's what worked for me.

1. Launch Cygwin terminal and then run the following two strings.

   mkpasswd -c > /etc/passwd
   mkgroup -c > /etc/group
   

2. Edit your "/etc/nsswitch.conf" file to contain the following two lines.

   passwd:   files # db
   group:    files # db
   

3. Relaunch Cygwin.

Cygwin opens quickly.

Answer 2

If you are on a network with a large AD directory mkpasswd will take a lot of time (several days in my case). So consider using:

mkpasswd -c -l > /etc/passwd
mkgroup -c -l > /etc/group

 -l,--local [machine]    Print local user accounts of \"machine\",
                         from local machine if no machine specified.
                         Automatically adding machine prefix for local
                         machine depends on settings in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Answer 3

Adding 'C:\cygwin64\bin' to the path worked for me.

Answer 4

Eventually I found what causes this issue, but I'm still not sure why. Cygwin works for other people in same environment very well.

Cause: On the start of every Cygwin application it tries to get credentials as it is described in etc/nsswitch.conf file. For some reason, it takes a lots of time for my account as it contacts with several Active Directory domain controllers via LDAP.

Solution 1: You can save the current user and group in etc/passwd and etc/group files and set Cygwin to check them before Active Directory.

1. Start mintty.exe and wait till it opens
2. Run mkpasswd -c and save its output to etc/passwd file (you will have to create it, output should be one line)
3. Run mkgroup -c and save its output to etc/group file (you will have to create it, output should be one line)
4. Open etc/nsswitch.conf and write

nsswitch.conf contents:

passwd: files # db
group:  files # db

Now your Cygwin should start immediately.

Solution 2: There is special CygServer application, shipped with Cygwin, which can be started as an NT service or as a simple process (just run usr/sbin/cygserver.exe). It caches credentials and propagates them to every next Cygwin process while cygserver is running.

Add it to startup or start it before your Cygwin session and you're good — cygserver startup will take time, but every next Cygwin process will start immediately.

Is it your case? I want to share my investigation steps, so you could check, if your case is same to mine.

• Install MS Network Monitor as it is able to show traffic from a specific process. Run it as administrator.
• Create New capture tab and click Start (you don't have to add any filters or anything).
• Start mintty and you will see its connections in netmon:
• You will see list of mintty connections in the tree view on the left and TCP and LDAP frames on the right after selecting on of those connections.
• Additionally, you can get name of those remote machines by IP address. Run nbtstat -a 8.8.8.8 in command line (replace 8.8.8.8 by one of IP addresses from netmon).

Going deeper: I'm still playing with etc/nsswitch.conf file to get local credentials or maybe cached ones so it will run faster without cygserver. But no luck yet.