I don't think any of your explanations explain it:  the lines weren't
particularly long and I was using ocaml 3.06 on both linux and windows. 
And I did the test multiple times, in different orders, so the caching
is not the issue.

And, of course, the weirdest thing is that this appears to be a
windows-specific problem.  On Linux, there speed difference between wc
and my program was quite small.  The x70 difference was only found on
the mingw builds I tried.  (I didn't try a straight cygwin version,
since I don't have that build system set up at present.)

So, any other ideas, or suggestion as to how to narrow down the problem?

Thanks,
Yaron

On Mon, 2002-10-28 at 10:26, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > I've noticed some strangely slow behavior from input_line on mingw.  I
> > wrote a simple loop to scan through a file, and found that for a given
> > file, it took about 10 seconds to run, whereas wc -l took only a small
> > fraction of a second -- the difference was about a factor of 70.  This is
> > on a W2K machine using mingw.  On the other hand, using the same file on a
> > linux box, the difference between wc -l and my code was only about a
> > factor of 3.
> > Any ideas where the big difference might be coming from?   The code I
> > wrote is attached below.
> 
> input_line has to work a bit harder than wc because it actually copies
> the data to strings.  However, on my tests with your program (Linux,
> OCaml 3.06), this makes essentially no difference: both your code and
> wc run at about 50 Mb/s.  
> 
> Two possible explanations:
> 
> 1- The file wasn't in the file cache when you timed your program; then you
> timed wc, at which time the file was in the file cache.  In other
> terms, you're measuring the difference between a "cold cache read" and a
> "warm cache read".  Try measuring wc first :-)
> 
> 2- Your file contains very long lines and you're using OCaml 3.04 or
> earlier.  There was a performance bug in pre-3.06 versions causing
> input_line to run slowly on very long lines (100000 characters or
> more).
> 
> - Xavier Leroy
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