Re: [bug-gawk] Increased RAM memory usage in gawk 5.0.1 compared to gawk 4.1.4

[Finn Magnusson]

 Hi
Thank you for the info !Regarding the patch, yes you are right it is not 
suitable for programs that use IGNORECASE. Alternatively it could possibly be 
included as a new gawk command line option such as "--disable-ignorecase" for 
programs that dont make use of IGNORECASE and need to save memory. In our gawk 
application we dont use IGNORECASE so the patch saves around 40-50% memory 
(about 100 MB RAM). But maybe there is not many users who are in our situation .
Thanks
Finn

    On Sunday, August 11, 2019, 3:42:44 PM GMT+2, address@hidden 
<address@hidden> wrote:  
 
 Hi.

Finn Magnusson via bug-gawk <address@hidden> wrote:

> Dear gawk developers
>
> Our team recently started using gawk 5.0.1 and found that the RAM memory
> usage seems to have increased compared to gawk version 4.1.4, which we
> were using before.

It seems that the run time also went way up. On 10 iterations, gawk-4.1.4
takes about 11 minutes, and gawk-master takes about 19. gawk-4.2.1 seems
to run about the same time as 4.1.4 but takes more memory, but still less
than gawk-master.

Running valgrind on 2 iterations found zero definite leaks.  That's good,
but it means that the issue is more subtle. I am continuing to investigate.

BTW, your change to disable the 4.2 IGNORECASE speed-up is fine for your
program, which doesn't use IGNORECASE, but is wrong for the general
case, so I cannot include it in the code base.

Thanks,

Arnold