Ack vs Ag aka The Silver Searcher
Silver Searcher
Today I stumbled upon the silver searcher (command line ag) which appears to be a replacement for the fast grep replacement ack.
It appears to be a drop in replacement. Instead of typing ack I save one letter and type ag and get the same output. I’m sure that some buried options are different, but I never used the advanced options of ack.
Arch Linux has it readily available (package name the_silver_searcher) and the package size is a tick smaller, not that it matters, at all.
Benchmark
To decide if it was worth it, I took it for a quick spin searching for a rare keyword in the Linux kernel. I preheated my file system cache to ensure I wase testing the program and not my disks.
The result? A significant speed-up! My simple benchmark search went from 20 seconds to 0.5 seconds. It’s possible the silver searcher is skipping certain things, but by noting the parallel operation and increased CPU usage jumping from 99% to 325% suggests it’s capitalizing on my spare cores. I’ll take it.
Just need to remember to type ag instead of ack.
Raw Benchmark Commands
~/t/linux ❯❯❯ time ack canbus
arch/sh/drivers/pci/pci.c
35:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_channel *hose)
125: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
145: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
arch/mips/pci/pci.c
79:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_controller *hose)
209: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
248: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
drivers/net/can/Kconfig
64: LEDs and you want to use them as canbus activity indicators.
ack canbus 19.28s user 0.71s system 99% cpu 19.992 total
~/t/linux ❯❯❯ time ag canbus
arch/sh/drivers/pci/pci.c
35:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_channel *hose)
125: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
145: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
arch/mips/pci/pci.c
79:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_controller *hose)
209: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
248: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
drivers/pci/hotplug/cpqphp_pci.c
206:static int PCI_ScanBusForNonBridge(struct controller *ctrl, u8 bus_num, u8 *dev_num)
271: if (PCI_ScanBusForNonBridge(ctrl, tbus, dev_num) == 0) {
drivers/net/can/Kconfig
64: LEDs and you want to use them as canbus activity indicators.
ag canbus 0.93s user 0.44s system 322% cpu 0.425 total
~/t/linux ❯❯❯ time ack canbus
arch/sh/drivers/pci/pci.c
35:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_channel *hose)
125: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
145: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
arch/mips/pci/pci.c
79:static void pcibios_scanbus(struct pci_controller *hose)
209: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
248: pcibios_scanbus(hose);
drivers/net/can/Kconfig
64: LEDs and you want to use them as canbus activity indicators.
ack canbus 19.39s user 0.55s system 99% cpu 19.944 total
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