grep, etc

[Fairlight]

At Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 01:27:55PM -0400 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bob Stockler was observed uttering:
> | 
> | But will that kind of difference hold up over time?  Is it being done on a
> | completely placid system, or do you have, say...smail running in the
> | background, possibly with spamassassin, potentially skewing your CPU
> | cycles?
> 
> I don't know, and don't intend to find out.

Well, I'm just saying...the relatively trivial times involved could be due
to other CPU use, disk I/O, disk caching...  Unless you start with
relatively the same conditions and have a placid system for each test, it's
not necessarily a completely valid test so much as it is a benchmark.
Likewise, if you reverse the order of the tests, you might see a reverse in
the speeds, if disk caching helps you out.

> In my tests comparing the various flavors of AWK I compared
> three flavors at a time, executing each of them 12 times to
> do just one AWK task, from just reading the test file and
> doing nothing, to printing each line of the file, splitting
> the lines into fields, not splitting them, etc.  All output
> was redirected to /dev/null.

Hmmmm...the 12 times pretty much throws the disk caching argument out the
window though, especially when you toss the high and low.  Still, I'd want
a guaranteed placid system.  Even then, over 12 iterations, unless you're
getting remarkably unlucky, it should average to something relatively
correct, so I'd say you're probably reflecting about the true nature of the
relative speeds.  "Close enough for government work."

> BTW, as GNU gawk developed (and added some features) it
> slowed down.  In one test I compared "mawk 1.3.2" with

Gee, sounds a lot like the linux kernel.  I'd -swear- that the 2.4 kernel
is a significant percentage slower on the same hardware than 2.2 and
definitely 2.0.

Tasks expand to consume all available CPU horsepower.  :)

mark->
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