On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Alan W. Irwin irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca wrote: [...]
bash.exe-3.1$ which echo /z/home/wine/newstart1/MinGW/msys/1.0/bin/echo.exe
bash.exe-3.1$ time echo "hello" hello
real 0m0.000s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s
This shows there is at least one command (echo) available under wine that executes with essentially zero latency. So the problem cannot be the time wine takes to read the executable file (/z/home/wine/newstart1/MinGW/msys/1.0/bin/echo.exe in this case). But the rest of the commands I tried had latencies near 1 second. (I only report the second run in each case to make sure as much as possible is cached in memory for maximum speed.)
Aside from any actual slowdown, this test is not accurate - echo is a shell builtin. Try timing running the actual echo executable (with full path) rather than just "echo" (which will run the builtin).