Dear friends of the monastery,
Upon searching, there lives a MCE wc.pl example. Please note that timings for wc.pl include the time to load Perl itself plus modules and spawn/reap workers.
Preparation:
$ curl -O http://www.textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/lesms10.txt
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marioroy/mce-examples/mast
+er/other/wc.pl
$ chmod 755 wc.pl
$ rm -f lesms10_big.txt
$ for i in `seq 1 200`; do cat lesms10.txt >> lesms10_big.txt; done
$ ls -lh lesms10*
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmuser staff 3.1M Nov 13 19:27 lesms10.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmuser staff 623M Nov 13 19:39 lesms10_big.txt
# Read once before testing to be fair for 1st and subsequent wc/wc.pl.
# Sorry, I didn't want to go through the trouble clearing OS cache.
$ cat lesms10_big.txt >/dev/null
Results: wc
$ time wc lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m2.132s
user 0m2.076s
sys 0m0.056s
$ time wc < lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200
real 0m2.140s
user 0m2.085s
sys 0m0.055s
Results: wc.pl
$ time ./wc.pl lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.536s (3.98x)
user 0m3.570s
sys 0m0.591s
$ time ./wc.pl < lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200
real 0m0.740s (2.89x)
user 0m3.784s
sys 0m1.166s
Results: line count
$ time wc -l lesms10_big.txt
14152200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.351s
user 0m0.296s
sys 0m0.055s
$ time ./wc.pl -l lesms10_big.txt
14152200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.208s
user 0m0.678s
sys 0m0.835s
Results: word count
$ time wc -w lesms10_big.txt
113528600 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m2.125s
user 0m2.071s
sys 0m0.054s
$ time ./wc.pl -w lesms10_big.txt
113528600 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.535s
user 0m3.574s
sys 0m0.599s
Results: byte count
$ time wc -c lesms10_big.txt
652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.003s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.002s
$ time ./wc.pl -c lesms10_big.txt
652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.054s
user 0m0.042s
sys 0m0.010s
Clearing OS cache:
The beliefs of yesterday may no longer be true today. These days, running on one core may be the bottleneck versus IO. Especially for hardware IO reaching gigabytes and beyond. Long ago, I removed old beliefs no longer matching with reality. This mind shift energized me to try, only to be surprised. So kudos to the OP for trying.
Linux: sudo echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
macOS: sudo purge
$ time wc lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m2.435s
user 0m2.330s
sys 0m0.098s
Linux: sudo echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
macOS: sudo purge
$ time ./wc.pl lesms10_big.txt
14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
real 0m0.662s (3.68x)
user 0m3.598s
sys 0m0.736s
Bless to you all,