Probably nanoseconds, so no big deal

I thought that sounded optimistically fast, so here's the benchmark:

$ cat pore.pl 
#!/usr/bin/env perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark 'cmpthese';

open my $fh, '>', '/tmp/wp.txt' or die $!;
cmpthese (10000,
    {
        'print' => sub { print $fh "x\n"; },
        'echo'  => sub { system "echo x >> /tmp/we.txt"; }
    }
);
close $fh;
exit;
$ perl pore.pl 
            (warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
                        Rate                 echo                print
echo                   317/s                   --                -100%
print 10000000000000000000/s 3153000000000000000%                   --

[download]

Yes, print is so much faster than shelling out each time it is practially immeasurable. They'll get closer if you do the open and close inside the sub of course and that would mean losing the buffering too but it's still going to beat the pants off a fork and a shell invocation each time just to do a one-line write.

Upshot: on my machine here it isn't nanoseconds - it's more like 3 milliseconds.

In reply to Re^4: snmpget is missing some values by hippo
in thread snmpget is missing some values by leostereo

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