Monks,

I have tracked down a performance issue in my application that can be highlighted with the example below. Although the example is trival I want to understand why Windows (Vista) is so much slower than Linux (typically 70-100 times slower depending on the version of Perl) when growing a scalar? I have tested this under Perl 5.8.x and Perl 5.10.x. Could this be a bug?

The original thread for this question is here http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=810049

Regards, Red. 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $iter = 1000000;         #number of items 
my $string ='';             #our string
my $teststring='abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890'; #what to grow t
+he string

#Comment out this line to speed things up under windows.
#$string = 1 x ($iter* length($teststring));
Time();
$string='';
for (1..$iter) {
  $string.=$teststring;
}
Time();

print "Finished\n";
sleep(2000);

sub Time {
 my ($user,$system,$cuser,$csystem) = times;
 print "$user,$system\n";
}

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In reply to Why is Windows 100 times slower than Linux when growing a large scalar? by Anonymous Monk

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