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Comment by anooh | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is amazing. It's super fast and has a very easy to follow help page, plus the formatting is pretty awesome. I just did a quick benchmark searching for `kthreadd` using grep and ag and it's magnitudes faster than grep. Thank you for sharing this. I hope I can convince the network admins at my workplace to install this tool.

In addition, A+ for the ag's design for `mmap()` ing files instead reading them into a buffer.

Bench marks: Using Grep

```bash $ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd" ... real 0m25.341s user 0m5.738s sys 0m4.074s ```

Using ag: ```bash $ time ag "kthreadd" ...

real 0m2.182s user 0m1.306s sys 0m1.773s ```

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> I just did a quick benchmark searching for `kthreadd` using grep and ag and it's magnitudes faster than grep.

I'd be careful with that. You may have just tested the awesomeness of linux caches :-)

Yes, it "looks" magnitudes faster:

  ]$ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m26.895s
  user    0m3.131s
  sys     0m3.151s

  ]$ time ag "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m0.906s
  user    0m1.930s
  sys     0m1.186s

  ]$ time rg "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m0.860s
  user    0m1.756s
  sys     0m1.123s

But wait, somehow grep got magnitutes faster too:

  ]$ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m2.961s
  user    0m1.979s
  sys     0m0.959s

And we can make both ag and rg slower:

  ]# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  ]$ time ag "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m17.761s
  user    0m2.371s
  sys     0m2.728s

  ]# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  ]$ time rg "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m19.276s
  user    0m1.859s
  sys     0m3.063s

I'd suggest ripgrep [0] for even faster results.

[0] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

ripgrep doesn't seem to just be fast, it has a good set of features compared to the alternatives too! https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

I always wondered what the differences between all those mysteriously named search tools are, great resource, thanks for sharing!

Might also want to use FZF as selection interface for the ripgrep results, if applicable.

It's Rust-based, though, and is thus difficult to get installed on older systems.

Which systems? I have a ten year old laptop it works fine on.

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