Well I ran 10 iterations on the benchmark as you saw. I have also done greps on fresh data files (which were certainly not cached) and the difference in speed was very small (~1%) compared with subsequent searches. I do believe grep is far faster than even running data files through an empty loop. I definitely wish there was a better pure Perl solution.

This is of course because I'm using grep as a "dumb" tool to get context around the match. Then I feed this data into Perl where the true parsing is done (to remove irrelevant lines I don't wish to see). If I could do everything inside a Perl loop I would imagine it would be more efficient. In this case however Perl needs to find the line with the data header before the match, and continue after the match until the next header. I just haven't found a better way than "pre-searching" the file with grep. It's fast enough, but could it be faster? :D I'm turning into an efficiency addict now.

In reply to Re^6: search array for closest lower and higher number from another array by bigbot
in thread search array for closest lower and higher number from another array by bigbot

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.