On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 17:59, James Edward Gray II wrote: > On Jan 22, 2004, at 4:12 PM, Tim Johnson wrote: > > > Here's another argument against slurping: When you slurp a file all at > > once, even if your program isn't using up much of the CPU, on many > > machines it will slow down performance considerably if you slurp a > > large > > file (large, of course, is still sometimes relative). If that is the > > only thing you are running at the time, it may not make much of a > > difference, but it is usually not a good idea to assume that. > > The flip side of that argument. A quote from the earlier posted > article: > > "Another major win for slurping over line by line is speed. Perl's IO > system (like many others) is slow. Calling <> for each line requires a > check for the end of line, checks for EOF, copying a line, munging the > internal handle structure, etc. Plenty of work for each line read in. > On the other hand, slurping, if done correctly, will usually involve > only one I/O call and no extra data copying. The same is true for > writing files to disk, and we will cover that as well." --Uri Guttman
Just to add my $0.02, while you are likely to see your machine slow to a halt if you slurp too big a file, there is no guarantee that the extra overhead required for going line by line will be noticed, especially if you're doing enough other things on every line. -Dan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
