GNU bug report logs - #21763
poor performance since grep 2.19 when comparing files with grep

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: "Bennett, Steve" <S.Bennett <at> lancaster.ac.uk>
To: "bug-grep <at> gnu.org" <bug-grep <at> gnu.org>
Subject: poor performance since grep 2.19 when comparing files with grep
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2015 12:54:01 +0000

Apologies in advance if this is more of a "discuss" question, but it looks like a particular use-case shows a marked change in performance between recent versions of grep.

A colleague mentioned a performance issue with grep to me, and its puzzling me a bit.
It turns out that he was using "grep -Fvif" to find lines in one file that are not present in another.

Up until grep 2.18 this seems to work with linear performance and it takes less than 50ms to compare files up to about 20,000 lines.
With grep 2.19 and later, ever relatively small files are quite slow, runtime (and memory use) increases exponentially (e.g. 300ms to compare 200 lines, 1.5s to compare 400 lines, 5s to compare 600 lines).

I've shown my colleague how to use sort and diff (and "comm", which I think is vastly underrated), but it made me wonder if this is a reasonable thing to expect grep to be able to do, and whether such a performance drop should be seen as a bug.

The way he was using it, he had two (unsorted) data sets (about 6000 rows in each), with most lines being common, and he was just using:
    grep -Fvif FILE1 FILE2
In his case, the older version of grep took way less than a second to run, but after he had upgraded his machine it took 20 minutes before running out of swap and seg faulting. 

In terms of comparing performance, I've found that the following works to compare performance (vary N to try different sized data files):
    N=600; F=/tmp/zz.$$; seq -f '%g bottles of beer on the wall' 1 $N > $F; time grep -Fvif $F $F; rm $F

Steve.

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