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NAME | PCRE PERFORMANCE | COMPILED PATTERN MEMORY USAGE | STACK USAGE AT RUN TIME | PROCESSING TIME | AUTHOR | REVISION | COLOPHON |
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PCREPERFORM(3) Library Functions Manual PCREPERFORM(3)
PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions
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.
Patterns are compiled by PCRE into a reasonably efficient
interpretive 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 using the 8-bit library. When PCRE
is compiled with its default internal pointer size of two bytes,
the size limit on a compiled pattern is 64K data units, 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.
When pcre_exec() or pcre[16|32]_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.
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 use a multi-stage table lookup
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.
By default, the escape sequences \b, \d, \s, and \w, and the
POSIX character classes such as [:alpha:] do not use Unicode
properties, partly for backwards compatibility, and partly for
performance reasons. However, you can set PCRE_UCP if you want
Unicode character properties to be used. This can double the
matching time for items such as \d, when matched with a
traditional matching function; the performance loss is less with
a DFA matching function, and in both cases there is not much
difference for \b.
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.
Philip Hazel
University Computing Service
Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Last updated: 25 August 2012
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 University of Cambridge.
This page is part of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular
Expressions) project. Information about the project can be found
at ⟨http://www.pcre.org/⟩. If you have a bug report for this
manual page, see
⟨http://bugs.exim.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=PCRE⟩. This page was
obtained from the tarball pcre-8.45.tar.gz fetched from
⟨ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/⟩ on
2021-08-27. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
PCRE 8.30 09 January 2012 PCREPERFORM(3)
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