Thread: Setting up a performace test C vs awk?

No, that's not a fair test. When you do a "man awk", you will see that there are many complex things you can do with it by calling it just once. The reason your example is so slow is because it does basically nothing and the overhead from so many processes being created and destroyed is enormous.

Try this instead, which is more or less equivalent to the C code:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
 
my_string="123rte"
yes $my_string | head -n 10000 | awk '{ print $1 }' > /dev/null 2>&1

The equivalent awk code would be

Code:

$ cat foo.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
  FILE *fp;
  fp = fopen("/dev/null", "w");
  char my_string[10] = "123rte";
  int i;
  for ( i = 0; i < 1000000; i++ )
  {
    fprintf(fp, "%s\n", my_string);
  }
  fclose(fp);
  return 0;
}
$gcc foo.c
$ time ./a.out 

real	0m0.113s
user	0m0.112s
sys	0m0.000s
$ cat foo.awk
#!/bin/awk
BEGIN {
  for ( i = 0; i < 1000000; i++ )
    print "123rte";
}
$ time awk -f foo.awk > /dev/null

real	0m0.140s
user	0m0.136s
sys	0m0.000s

Yes, awk is almost as fast.

But part of the attraction is being able to do regular expressions directly in the language, instead of having to do an awful lot of code yourself (even with a library).

It stands to reason that its speed would be comparable to python, since both are interpreted languages.

Originally Posted by Leam

I was told someone's awk code ran almost as fast as C.

...

Code:

#!/bin/bash

my_string="123rte"
for (( n=0; n<10000; n++)) do
  echo $my_string | awk '{ print $1 }' > /dev/null 2>&1
done

The problem with this benchmark is that you're launching awk 10000 times to do a very small amount of work. I would imagine most of the execution time of this would be spent creating and destroying subprocesses.