Maybe I’m the last user on earth using Cygwin (I doubt it considering the project is well maintained and its newsletter is very active) but lately I noticed that opening the terminal window takes really long time.

After digging a little bit I found the problem came from my working pc logged on an Active Directory domain (for instance I’m not an AD lover… but that’s another story) and obviously Stackoverflow had the solution (I’m quite surprise we didn’t found the cure for cancer or the meaning of life on it… yet).

https://superuser.com/questions/877051/cygwin-from-windows-is-very-slow-laggy/1183283

I report it here just in case some day Stackoverflow will be bought by some lunatic billionaire that will decide to turn it into ashes…

Rough solution:

$ mkpasswd -l -c >/etc/passwd
$ mkgroup -l -c >/etc/group
$ echo 'passwd: files' >> /etc/nsswitch.conf
$ echo 'group: files' >>/etc/nsswitch.conf

More elegant solution

$ cygserver-config
Generating /etc/cygserver.conf file

Warning: The following function requires administrator privileges!

Do you want to install cygserver as service?
(Say "no" if it's already installed as service) (yes/no) yes

The service has been installed under LocalSystem account.
To start it, call `net start cygserver' or `cygrunsrv -S cygserver'.

Further configuration options are available by editing the configuration
file /etc/cygserver.conf. Please read the inline information in that
file carefully. The best option for the start is to just leave it alone.

Basic Cygserver configuration finished. Have fun!