[bug-gawk] gawk 3.1.7 on RHEL6 much slower than 3.1.3 on RHEL 4.7?

[Joseph Watkins]

Hi all,

I have two identical servers in terms of hardware (actually vm's), one
at RHEL 4.7 gawk 3.1.3, one at RHEL 6 gawk 3.1.7

On RHEL6 gawk is very much slower. I did a simple test on a  3.7M line
text file, with a simple gawk command:

On RH4.7, gawk 3.1.3 I get:

time gawk '/^pat1/&&/pat2/ {x++};END {print "x="x}' file
x=40874

real 0m7.266s user 0m6.809s sys 0m0.460s

On RH6, gawk 3.1.7 I get same x result, with times:

real 1m28.138s user 1m27.657s sys 0m0.453s

7s vs 1m28s! Initially I thought something had happened to the vm
after upgrade, but other tests of CPU (e.g. gzips, the same program in
perl) produce similar results on each. So it seems to be down to gawk.
Not sure this is the correct place to ask, but are there known
performance problems with gawk 3.1.7 on RH 6?

Cheers,
Joe