in reply to Re: Are beheaded strings known to be slow?
in thread Are beheaded strings known to be slow?

That's what it is. Regex matching makes a copy of the scalar for use by $&, $1, etc. It uses the COW mechanism if possible. It doesn't for OOK scalars.

After one pass of test1's loop:

SV = PVMG(0x5bb22b8c3b80) at 0x5bb22b9beae8 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (SMG,POK,IsCOW,pPOK) <-- IsCOW: String buffer is shared IV = 0 NV = 0 PV = 0x5bb22b9ea230 "..." CUR = 99999 LEN = 100001 COW_REFCNT = 1 MAGIC = 0x5bb22b9c48f0 MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_mglob MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_regex_global(g) MG_FLAGS = 0x40 BYTES MG_LEN = -1

After one pass of test2's loop:

SV = PVMG(0x5bb22b8c3bb0) at 0x5bb22b9cc1f0 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (SMG,POK,OOK,pPOK) <-- !IsCOW: String buffer isn't shared IV = 0 NV = 0 OFFSET = 1 PV = 0x5bb22ba028e1 ( "\x01" . ) "..." CUR = 99999 LEN = 100001 MAGIC = 0x5bb22b9c48f0 MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_mglob MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_regex_global(g) MG_FLAGS = 0x40 BYTES MG_LEN = -1

That means a copy of the string buffer must have been made. By the end of the loop, a copy has been done 99,999 times (once per successful regex match).

You can run into the same issue with foreign string buffers (e.g. a memory-mapped file). See why is Perl File::Map so slow compared to File::Slurp?