I came across a post discussing the speed of forking in Cygwin, giving an expected 'fork rate' in Windows XP of around 30-50 per-second (link)

I've got a Core 2 duo (1.79GHz) which I would expect to get comparable results, but it's only managing around 8 forks per second (and sometimes a lot fewer):

$ while (true); do date --utc; done | uniq -c
      5 Wed Apr 21 12:38:10 UTC 2010
      6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:11 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:12 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:13 UTC 2010
      8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:14 UTC 2010
      8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:15 UTC 2010
      6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:16 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:18 UTC 2010
      9 Wed Apr 21 12:38:19 UTC 2010

Can you suggest anything I might be able to do to speed things up? This machine acts a lot slower in Cygwin than others I've used before which actually were a lot slower.