Hello, I ran some benchmarks of Bash 4.0-rc1. It is quite impressive! Here are the results. My computer is a Pentium M (running at 600 MHz for the test), running Linux 2.6.26 with libc6 version 2.7 and Debian bash-completion version 20080705. The figures are averages over 100 tests.
Bash 3.2, without bash malloc: * eval `dircolors`: 0.636s * source /etc/bash_completion: 0.721s Bash 4.0, with bash malloc: * eval `dircolors`: 0.385s * source /etc/bash_completion: 41.651s (around 93% of the time is spent in function find_entry of lib/malloc/table.c) Bash 4.0, without bash malloc: * eval `dircolors`: 0.132s * source /etc/bash_completion: 0.703s We notice that on my computer, libc6's malloc is definitively faster than Bash's malloc. More interesting is the fact that the various improvements to command substitution have dramatically reduced its execution time (eval `dircolors` is now 4.8 times faster!). Thank you very much for this wonderful new version of Bash! Nicolas
