Much faster? i18n? tls?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi,

Was tweaking with the grep patch, and also tracking another
thread in another list, which was showing how on Red Hat 9 a
simple text intensive program (called hspell) is much slower than
Red Hat 8, and investigations have shown so far that it's all
caused by /lib/tls.  Switching to /lib/i686 makes things go much
faster.  Any idea?  And it's not a multi-threaded application.


So I focus on sed:  Pretty slow on non-C locales:-(

[behdad at mces behdad]$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
[behdad at mces behdad]$ ll /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        73460 Oct 12 04:50 /bin/ls
[behdad at mces behdad]$ time sed -e 's/./x/g' /bin/ls > /dev/null

real    0m4.248s
user    0m3.800s
sys     0m0.000s
[behdad at mces behdad]$ time LANG=C sed -e 's/./x/g' /bin/ls > /dev/null

real    0m0.180s
user    0m0.050s
sys     0m0.000s
[behdad at mces behdad]$

And /bin/ls is only 72kb!!!


But you should have noticed that /bin/ls is not a valid UTF-8
piece.  Actually /bin/ls is very small, if you run it on a bigger
piece of garbage (speaking encoding ofcourse), it's hard not to
get a SegFault.  I have reported that here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=109606


Any idea?  May some one look if the same caching can be done
here?


behdad