Linux

In Search of Lost Time: GNU Grep 3.7 released with fix for ‘extreme performance degradation’

GNU grep 3.7 has been released with a fix for a bug causing “extreme performance degradation” in certain types of search. This search tool, which looks for character patterns in files, is a core utility on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. In November last year, a user noted: “I have a use case where I run grep with a large number of search patterns on a large text file. It works well with grep-3.3, but with grep-3.4 it quickly burned through GBs of memory and almost locked up my system due to swapping … even with just 30,000 patterns it exceeds the limit of 5GB.” By contrast, grep 3.3 used “just a few 100MB.”

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