C programs slow startup

Question

Even a simple HelloWorld program is taking about 30 seconds to run. Is there a way to speed up the execution? I tried it in codeblocks using MinGW. I have also tried it with Borland c++ 5.5 command line tools. In both the cases it took about 20 to 30 seconds to run, however compilation was quick.

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
    printf("HELLO");
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

Are you running antivirus software? My guess is that yours insists on heavy scanning of newly created executables before allowing them to run.

Another possibility is that (at least) one directory in the pathname for the executable file (or for some DLL it depends upon) has a very large number of files in it. On some versions of windows, by making directories containing roughly 64k file entries in them, you can make opening files in their subdirectories arbitrarily slow.