Man Linux: Main Page and Category List

NAME

       PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions

PCRE PERFORMANCE


       Two  aspects  of  performance  are  discussed  below:  memory usage and
       processing time.  The  way  you  express  your  pattern  as  a  regular
       expression can affect both of them.

COMPILED PATTERN MEMORY USAGE


       Patterns are compiled by PCRE into a reasonably efficient byte code, so
       that most simple patterns do not use much memory. However, there is one
       case  where  the memory usage of a compiled pattern can be unexpectedly
       large. If a parenthesized subpattern has a quantifier  with  a  minimum
       greater  than  1  and/or  a  limited  maximum,  the whole subpattern is
       repeated in the compiled code. For example, the pattern

         (abc|def){2,4}

       is compiled as if it were

         (abc|def)(abc|def)((abc|def)(abc|def)?)?

       (Technical aside: It is done this way so that backtrack  points  within
       each of the repetitions can be independently maintained.)

       For  regular expressions whose quantifiers use only small numbers, this
       is not usually a problem.  However,  if  the  numbers  are  large,  and
       particularly  if  such  repetitions  are  nested,  the memory usage can
       become an embarrassment. For example, the very simple pattern

         ((ab){1,1000}c){1,3}

       uses 51K bytes when compiled. When PCRE is compiled  with  its  default
       internal  pointer  size  of  two  bytes,  the  size limit on a compiled
       pattern is 64K, and this is reached with the above pattern if the outer
       repetition is increased from 3 to 4. PCRE can be compiled to use larger
       internal pointers and thus handle larger compiled patterns, but  it  is
       better to try to rewrite your pattern to use less memory if you can.

       One  way  of reducing the memory usage for such patterns is to make use
       of PCRE’s "subroutine" facility. Re-writing the above pattern as

         ((ab)(?2){0,999}c)(?1){0,2}

       reduces the memory requirements to 18K, and indeed it remains under 20K
       even  with the outer repetition increased to 100. However, this pattern
       is not exactly equivalent, because the "subroutine" calls  are  treated
       as  atomic groups into which there can be no backtracking if there is a
       subsequent matching failure. Therefore, PCRE cannot  do  this  kind  of
       rewriting  automatically.   Furthermore,  there is a noticeable loss of
       speed when executing the modified pattern. Nevertheless, if the  atomic
       grouping  is  not  a  problem and the loss of speed is acceptable, this
       kind of rewriting will allow you to process patterns that  PCRE  cannot
       otherwise handle.

STACK USAGE AT RUN TIME


       When  pcre_exec()  is  used  for matching, certain kinds of pattern can
       cause  it  to  use  large  amounts  of  the  process  stack.  In   some
       environments  the  default process stack is quite small, and if it runs
       out the result is often SIGSEGV.   This  issue  is  probably  the  most
       frequently  raised  problem with PCRE. Rewriting your pattern can often
       help. The pcrestack documentation discusses this issue in detail.

PROCESSING TIME


       Certain  items  in  regular  expression  patterns  are  processed  more
       efficiently  than others. It is more efficient to use a character class
       like [aeiou] than  a  set  of  single-character  alternatives  such  as
       (a|e|i|o|u).  In  general,  the simplest construction that provides the
       required behaviour is usually the most efficient. Jeffrey Friedl’s book
       contains  a  lot  of useful general discussion about optimizing regular
       expressions for efficient performance. This  document  contains  a  few
       observations about PCRE.

       Using  Unicode  character  properties  (the  \p, \P, and \X escapes) is
       slow, because PCRE has to scan a structure that contains data for  over
       fifteen  thousand  characters whenever it needs a character’s property.
       If you can find an alternative pattern  that  does  not  use  character
       properties, it will probably be faster.

       When  a  pattern  begins  with .* not in parentheses, or in parentheses
       that are not the subject of a backreference, and the PCRE_DOTALL option
       is  set, the pattern is implicitly anchored by PCRE, since it can match
       only at the start of a subject string. However, if PCRE_DOTALL  is  not
       set,  PCRE  cannot  make this optimization, because the . metacharacter
       does not then match a newline,  and  if  the  subject  string  contains
       newlines,   the  pattern  may  match  from  the  character  immediately
       following one of them instead of from the very start. For example,  the
       pattern

         .*second

       matches  the subject "first\nand second" (where \n stands for a newline
       character), with the match starting at the seventh character. In  order
       to do this, PCRE has to retry the match starting after every newline in
       the subject.

       If you are using such a  pattern  with  subject  strings  that  do  not
       contain   newlines,   the  best  performance  is  obtained  by  setting
       PCRE_DOTALL, or starting the pattern  with  ^.*  or  ^.*?  to  indicate
       explicit  anchoring.  That  saves  PCRE  from  having to scan along the
       subject looking for a newline to restart at.

       Beware of patterns that contain nested indefinite  repeats.  These  can
       take  a  long time to run when applied to a string that does not match.
       Consider the pattern fragment

         ^(a+)*

       This can match "aaaa" in 16 different ways, and this  number  increases
       very  rapidly  as the string gets longer. (The * repeat can match 0, 1,
       2, 3, or 4 times, and for each of those cases other than 0 or 4, the  +
       repeats  can  match  different numbers of times.) When the remainder of
       the pattern is such that the entire match is going to fail, PCRE has in
       principle  to  try  every  possible  variation,  and  this  can take an
       extremely long time, even for relatively short strings.

       An optimization catches some of the more simple cases such as

         (a+)*b

       where a literal character follows. Before  embarking  on  the  standard
       matching  procedure,  PCRE  checks  that  there  is  a "b" later in the
       subject string, and if there is not, it fails  the  match  immediately.
       However, when there is no following literal this optimization cannot be
       used. You can see the difference by comparing the behaviour of

         (a+)*\d

       with the pattern above. The former gives  a  failure  almost  instantly
       when  applied  to  a  whole  line of "a" characters, whereas the latter
       takes an appreciable time with strings longer than about 20 characters.

       In many cases, the solution to this kind of performance issue is to use
       an atomic group or a possessive quantifier.

AUTHOR


       Philip Hazel
       University Computing Service
       Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.

REVISION


       Last updated: 07 March 2010
       Copyright (c) 1997-2010 University of Cambridge.