Performance concerns when heavily used in scripts ?

Posted Mar 19, 2025 15:13 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541)
In reply to: Performance concerns when heavily used in scripts ? by PeeWee
Parent article: Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

> if every call to a uutil incurs that kind of overhead existing scripts will be noticeably slower.

Will they? Per the original post in this subthread, uutils has an invocation overhead of 4.6s/2000=0.0023s (minus the shell looping overhead). Keep in mind that more complex coreutils utilities will have higher overhead than /usr/bin/true as they need to link in more libraries and map more pages, reducing the relative penalty of uutils. And of course most uses of these utilities actually do more work, amortizing the startup overhead.

> But of course things like find and sort may end up being faster, depending on the size of their working set.

I think things like find, sort, cp etc. will be faster or slower depending on the implementation and tuning choices, algorithms used etc. None of which is impacted by the overhead of launching the binary in the first case.