Make grep 50x faster

Re:Make grep 50x faster by simias on Sunday December 15, 2013 @12:44PM (#6910111)

Maybe your default locale is already C?

I'm still surprised that TFA can claim such a speedup, I would have thought IO speed was the bottleneck when you grep through a big amount of data.

As an other poster mentioned I wonder if the speedup is not mainly disk caching in RAM during the 2nd run.

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Re:Make grep 50x faster by masklinn on Sunday December 15, 2013 @12:50PM (#6910129)

FWIW my locale is en_GB.utf-8 and I also get no difference (in fact, the version with locale is slightly faster than without), with GNU grep 2.14 on OSX 10.9.

The built-in BSD grep (2.5.1-FreeBSD) also runs in 30% of the time GNU grep does.

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Re:Make grep 50x faster by a8da6b0c91d on Sunday December 15, 2013 @06:45PM (#6911663)

I just did 'strings /dev/urandom > stuff' for 100M. Got it in memory first with untimed grep, then:

    $ time grep -i blah stuff
    bLAH
    blAH

    real	0m7.227s
    user	0m7.194s
    sys	0m0.011s

    $ time LANG=C grep -i blah stuff
    bLAH
    blAH

    real	0m0.486s
    user	0m0.467s
    sys	0m0.016s

So a pretty big difference. My default lang is en_US.utf8.

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