Re: Increase efficiency of script

Can you just use <pre> tags and maybe just:

system('cat', $file)
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Reading line by line is bound to slow you down a bit, though I don't know how much, if any, this will help.

Update: Why even use perl here...just:

#!/bin/sh
echo "(html header stuff)"
echo "</pre>"
cat file1 file2 file3
echo "</pre></html>"
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Re: Re: Increase efficiency of script by davido (Cardinal) on Mar 20, 2004 at 08:48 UTC
No, really, you guys are looking for optimization in the wrong place. How long does it take on your system for a Perl script to read a 250k text file line by line and print it line by line? Almost no time at all. I had to benchmark 100 iterations of that sort of routine just to measure a two-second execution time. If a script, reading line by line 250k of data and outputting it via CGI, results in page loads in the order of "an eternity", there's definately a problem. My guess is that your problem will be one of the following: Your flock is waiting for the file to become available. This could be awhile if there are lots of processes competing for it. The POD for flock states: Two potentially non-obvious but traditional flock semantics are that it waits indefinitely until the lock is granted, and that its locks merely advisory. It takes 64 seconds to load 256k of data through a 45kbps telephone modem connection. Long ping times, packet loss, and other network latency issues could contribute to slow page loads. Server load could be an issue. But I wouldn't be too quick to blame the segment of code that reads the file line by line and prints it; that's not doing anything that would take an eternity to execute. Dave	[reply]
Re^3: Increase efficiency of script by bart (Canon) on Mar 20, 2004 at 17:43 UTC
You're still forgetting one possible cause, davido. If a browser like the MSIE 5.x on the Mac, reads such a long file, it simply takes a long time to render. I'm almost sure that loading the 250k file from local disk may easily take 10 to 20 seconds, maybe even longer, before it shows up in the browser. Solution? Cut up the text in smaller pieces. People tend to prefer it that way.	[reply]