GNU bug report logs - #18454
Improve performance when -P (PCRE) is used in UTF-8 locales

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From: Vincent Lefevre <vincent <at> vinc17.net>
To: 18454 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#18454: Improve performance when -P (PCRE) is used in UTF-8 locales
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 03:24:49 +0200

With the patch that fixes bug 18266, grep -P works again on binary
files (with invalid UTF-8 sequences), but it is now significantly
slower than old versions (which could yield undefined behavior).

Timings with the Debian packages on my personal svn working copy
(binary + text files):

2.18-2   0.9s with -P, 0.4s without -P
2.20-3  11.6s with -P, 0.4s without -P

On this example, that's a 13x slowdown! Though the performance issue
would better be fixed in libpcre3, I suppose that it is not so simple
and won't occur any time soon. Things could be done in grep:

1. Ignore -P when the pattern would have the same meaning without -P
   (patterns could also be transformed, e.g. "a\d+b" -> "a[0-9]\+b",
   at least for the simplest cases).

2. Call PCRE in the C locale when this is equivalent.

3. Transform invalid bytes to null bytes in-place before the PCRE
   call. This changes the current semantic, but:
   * the semantic on invalid bytes has never been specified, AFAIK;
   * the best *practical* behavior may not be the current one
     (I personally prefer to be able to match invalid bytes, just
     like one can match top-bit-set characters in the C locale, and
     seeing such invalid bytes as equivalent to null bytes would
     not be a problem for most users, IMHO -- things can also be
     configurable).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent <at> vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)

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