Did it help? Quite a bit, actually. This was one component in an otherwise quite decent system, written by a coder who was essentially a temp. The file-IO stuff was handled as efficiently as reasonable in Perl and with appropriate error-checking. It's entirely a File-IO type of system.

The operation is only done once, though, and 300 times nothing can still be pretty small.

See, that's just it. We're talking about large chunks of text, handled a line at a time for memory's sake -- so this operation is repeated tens of thousands of times per run, and many thousands of runs per day (many of which are in parallel -- this doesn't slam the processor by any stretch, since we wait mostly on I/O).

Now, the actual performance difference in the app at large was no where near the 30_000% in the demonstration but it was significant, and certainly worth doing. This change alone made roughly a 350% difference, and that was after improving the I/O routine to read and process up to 500 lines of text at a time, instead of one.

<–radiant.matrix–>
A collection of thoughts and links from the minds of geeks
The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet

In reply to Re^2: The indisputable speed of tr/// by radiantmatrix
in thread The indisputable speed of tr/// by radiantmatrix

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