Let's consider ten thousand forks. $ cat winforktest.sh #!/home/busybox-1.35 sh i=1; while [ $i -lt 10000 ]; do (echo $i); i=$((i+1)); done On Linux, t

Let's consider ten thousand forks. $ cat winforktest.sh #!/home/busybox-1.35 sh i=1; while [ $i -lt 10000 ]; do (echo $i); i=$((i+1)); done On Linux, this takes: $ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.10 (Ootpa) $ time ./winforktest.sh > /dev/null real 0m0.792s user 0m0.490s sys 0m0.361s On Windows, c:\users\x>ver Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.5472] c:\users\x>busybox | busybox head -2 BusyBox v1.37.0-FRP-5236-g7dff7f376 (2023-12-06 10:31:32 GMT) (mingw64-gcc 13.2.1-5.fc39; mingw64-crt 11.0.0-2.fc39; glob) c:\users\x>busybox sh ~ $ time ./winforktest > /dev/null real 3m 44.44s user 0m 0.32s sys 0m 4.90s Windows is quite a bit slower, at least with Busybox. I understand that WSLv1 presents a more efficient fork(), which is not really available to shims like Cygwin or mingw.