I worked with a perl coder once who wrote something like this

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
`cd test_dir`
`gunzip test_script.tar.gz`
`tar -xvf test_script.tar`
#you are getting the idea now

[download]

I asked him why he did not just write a shell script, his answer with no note of irony was that he did not know shell !

The following was causing serious memmory hogage in a production environment, multiple instances (30+) were running at any time, each took about 4 seconds to complete and eat a big chunck of RAM. 

# we enter here with a hostname $host and must look it up
# in a file containing details for >100K hosts
open FH, $hosts_file or die "something appropriate\n";
while (<FH>) {
    ($a,$b,$c,$d)=split $_, /\t/, 4;
    # first entry in each line is hostname
    # $b is the data we need for the host
    $hash{$a}=$b;
}
if (exists $hash{$host}) {
    return $hash{$host}
} else {
    return error
}
# needles to say %hash was global, well everything was 
# and %hash used again

[download]

after the obvious changes it reduced to running in around 0.3 seconds, with a tweak to sort the hosts_file file when it was generated (once per day) and binary search it it was down to <0.04 secs per run

Cheers,
R.

In reply to Re: The joys of bad code by Random_Walk
in thread The joys of bad code by BUU

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