Re: [htdig-dev] to-do list for 3.1.6

[Geoff H. <ghu...@ws...>]

At 12:06 PM -0600 11/30/01, Gilles Detillieux wrote:
>This is the part I find a bit troubling, but I don't know what we
>can do about it.  I don't know why Armstrong's patch, which uses rx
>instead of regex, causes htdig to run 2-3 times faster, unless there
>are other changes between 092301 and 112501 that account for much of
>this, but it could well be just implementation efficiencies in one
>library and not in the other.

Ages and ages ago, I remember a small war over the most efficient 
regex implementation in other forums. At the time, I believe rx was 
considered the fastest for most things. So when I was working on 
htdig and saw rx, I wasn't surprised.

Then we had the wonderful discovery that using the system regex 
instead of rx improved life for building the endings db for almost 
everyone.

I'd be interested if a modification to the 3.2 code to use rx like 
the original Armstrong patch would give Joe a similar speed 
boost--this might be an interesting experiment.

I haven't done extensive timing tests and don't have the time 
required to do them on my Linux box. But I can't believe there's a 3x 
difference on Linux.

I'll see if I can dig up some autoconf tricks for switching between 
various regex implementations. If it's buried in HtRegex.* we can 
hide the changes from the rest of the code.

-- 
--
-Geoff Hutchison
Williams Students Online
http://wso.williams.edu/