miller/doc/content-for-performance.html
2017-02-17 20:57:28 -05:00

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POKI_PUT_TOC_HERE
<p/>
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<h1>Data</h1>
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Test data were of the form
<table><tr><td>
POKI_INCLUDE_ESCAPED(./data/small)HERE
</td><td>
POKI_INCLUDE_ESCAPED(./data/small.csv)HERE
</td></tr></table>
for DKVP and CSV, respectively, where fields <tt>a</tt> and <tt>b</tt> take one of five text values,
uniformly distributed; <tt>i</tt> is a 1-up line counter; <tt>x</tt> and <tt>y</tt>
are independent uniformly distributed floating-point numbers in the unit
interval.
<p>Data files of one million lines (totalling about 50MB for CSV and 60MB for
DKVP) were used. In experiments not shown here, I also varied the file sizes;
the size-dependent results were the expected, completely unsurprising
linearities and so I produced no file-size-dependent plots for your viewing pleasure.
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<h1>Comparands</h1>
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The <tt>cat</tt>, <tt>cut</tt>, <tt>awk</tt>, <tt>sed</tt>, <tt>sort</tt> tools
were compared to <tt>mlr</tt> on an 8-core Darwin laptop; RAM capacity was
nowhere near challenged . The <tt>catc</tt> program is a simple line-oriented
line-printer (<a
href="https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/blob/master/c/tools/catc.c">source
here</a>) which is intermediate between Miller (which is record-aware as well
as line-aware) and <tt>cat</tt> (which is only byte-aware).
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<h1>Raw results</h1>
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Note that for CSV data, the command is <tt>mlr --csvlite ...</tt> rather than <tt>mlr ...</tt>.
POKI_INCLUDE_ESCAPED(perftbl.txt)HERE
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<h1>Analysis</h1>
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<ul>
<li/> As expected, <tt>cat</tt> is very fast &mdash; it needs only stream bytes as quickly as possible; it doesn&rsquo;t even need to touch individual bytes.
<li/> My <tt>catc</tt> is also faster than Miller: it needs to read and write lines, but it doesn&rsquo;t segment lines into records; in fact it does no iteration over bytes in each line.
<li/> Miller does not outperform <tt>sed</tt>, which is string-oriented rather than record-oriented.
<li/> For the tools which do need to pick apart fields (<tt>cut</tt>,
<tt>awk</tt>, <tt>sort</tt>), Miller is comparable or outperforms. As noted above, this effect
persists linearly across file sizes.
<li/> For univariate and bivariate statistics, I didn&rsquo;t attempt to
compare to other tools wherein such computations are less straightforward;
rather, I attempted only to show that Miller&rsquo;s processing time here is comparable to its own processing time for other problems.
</ul>
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<h1>Conclusion</h1>
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For record-oriented data transformations, Miller meets or beats the Unix
toolkit in many contexts. Field renames in particular are worth doing as a
pre-pipe or post-pipe using <tt>sed</tt>.
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