Hi BrowserUk

Your indexing program is very neat. I never realized that it can be so simple and effective (in perl). Thanks!

I tried it on some large files (50 to 500 MB, with average line length about 150 characters).

I quickly spotted speed a problem with

$index .= pack 'd', tell FILE while <FILE>;
[download]

... it has to copy all previously packed data in every .= operation, so that the time grows with the square of number of lines. A big oh, O(x^2) to be precise.

Here is my (almost) drop-in replacement which trades memory space for indexing time

my @index = ( pack 'd', 0 );
push @index, pack 'd', tell FILE while <FILE>;
pop @index;
my $index = join '', @index;
[download]

... and the timing that shows roughly O(x) times for mine, and O(x^2) for yours (you can see the parabola in the table, if you look at it sideways).

In the last test case (the 527 MB file) with my script version the process memory usage peaked at +270 MB for a final index size of 27.5 MB.

Indexing mine : time   1 s, size   19949431, lines  136126
Indexing mine : time   2 s, size   40308893, lines  258457
Indexing mine : time   5 s, size   95227350, lines  634392
Indexing mine : time  29 s, size  527423877, lines 3441911

Indexing yours: time   2 s, size   19949431, lines  136127
Indexing yours: time   6 s, size   40308893, lines  258458
Indexing yours: time  31 s, size   95227350, lines  634393
Indexing yours: time 809 s, size  527423877, lines 3441912
[download]

I also added pop @index;, to get rid of the last index - it points to the end of the file, after the last line.

Rudif