Hello Rocky, Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 7:34:05 PM, you wrote:
RO> Before i pull my hair out doing bench/resource test, i was wondering if RO> anyone out there knew if there was much of a speed/resource usage RO> difference between the following way of writing the same rule. RO> Method A: RO> body rule_a /(?:feh|meh|bleh)/i RO> vs. RO> Method B: RO> bod __rule_a /(?:feh)/i RO> body __rule_b /(?:meh)/i RO> body __rule_c /(?:bleh)/i RO> meta rule_d (__rule_a || __rule_b || __rule_c) Well, the bod rule won't work very well... :-) RO> There probably isn't much difference using just 3 rules, but i'm thinking RO> more along the lines of large(500+) lists and it isn't limited to just body RO> stuff. So if anyone has some realworld benching/experience with what is RO> preferred or if the developers know which is faster for SA, i would love RO> the input. SARE's experience with BigEvil and EvilNumbers is that feh|meh|bleh won't be much different between these, but if you end up with dozens/hundreds of these, you'll definitely want to use combined regex, along the lines of body rule_ab /ab(?:ort|racadabra|raham)/ body rule_ac /ac(?:tion|cess|limate)/ body rule_x /x(?:ylophone|avier)/ Pulling out the leading character(s) from long strings will have a significant impact on the speed of the regex. The more you can do that, the more you'll benefit. But 500+ strings will be expensive no matter what you do. Bob Menschel
