Speed Test Results of Lilypond on Windows (Cygwin and coLinux)

[Joshua Koo]

Hi,

I setup a simple test to see how to lilypond takes to complete operating on a 
file, on cygwin compared to on colinux.

Platform this test is ran on is on a PIII 800MHz, 359MB ram, running Windows 2k.

Cygwin is installed selecting the Lilypond 2.4.2-1 package.
coLinux (0.6.2) runs the Debian-3.0r2.ext3-mit-backports.1gb image, and 
installed a stable Lilypond 2.4.2. Lilypond is ran using the coLinux shell, not 
under X.

The following tests files were taken from mutopiaproject
intermezzo.ly - http://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=535
bwv851a.ly - http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/BachJS/BWV851/bwv851a/bwv851a.ly
enchanted-island.ly - http://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=536
op149-19.ly -http://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=533

A script was use to run the test.

# script start (run.sh)
date > log.txt
lilypond file.ly
date >> log.txt
# script end

Time when lilypond starts and ends is recorded in the log file.

Here are the results.

1. intermezzo.ly
cygwin:
        start: Tue Mar 15 16:33:45 MPST 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 16:36:43 MPST 2005
        elapse: 2:58
colinux:
        start: Tue Mar 15 16:41:41 HKT 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 16:42:49 HKT 2005
        elapse: 1:07

2. bwv851a.ly
cygwin:
        start: Tue Mar 15 16:46:41 MPST 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 16:47:43 MPST 2005
        elapse: 1:02
colinux:
        start: Tue Mar 15 16:51:56 HKT 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 16:52:18 HKT 2005
        elapse: 0:22

3. enchanted-island.ly
cygwin:
        start: Tue Mar 15 17:07:10 MPST 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 17:07:34 MPST 2005
        elapse: 0:24
colinux:
        start: Tue Mar 15 17:10:05 HKT 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 17:10:35 HKT 2005
        elapse: 0:30

4.  op149-19.ly
cygwin:
        start: Tue Mar 15 17:14:50 MPST 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 17:15:44 MPST 2005
        elapse: 0:54
colinux:
        start: Tue Mar 15 16:41:41 HKT 2005
        end: Tue Mar 15 16:42:49 HKT 2005
        elapse: 1:08

cygwin total: 5:18
colinux total: 3:07

Conclusion and Comments.

Lilypond in Colinux does seems to run faster than in Cygwin. Statistically,  
lilypond in colinux runs 42% faster than cygwin (although some runs are faster 
in cygwin). Of course, the sample data is too little, and my test could be 
inaccurate in many ways. 

Another interesting factor is the time to get into the shell.
for cygwin bash shell, i took about 4s to load. for colinux, i took about 12s 
(plus u need to login with your username and password).

An werid observation I saw, lilypond in cygwin will take about 20+Mb of ram. In 
colinux, it seems to use only about 5Mb of ram, although I allocated 192MB of 
memory to the guest machine.

To the end of this test, I have no preferences to promote cygwin over colinux 
or vice-versa. coLinux have the flexiblity to run more like a linux os, but 
cygwin is much simpler to configure and install. Both have their pros and cons, 
so I leave it to the reader to try both and decide.

I'm open to any comments, or any test results you might come up with.

Joshua Koo