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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 08:58:33 +0100
> From: Joseph Watkins <address@hidden>
> 
> 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?

My guess is that the locale is to blame.  Try running the same program
on both machines with your locale set to "C".