Re: large file support in diff utils

[Chuck Swiger]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Chuck Swiger <address@hidden> writes: 
> > I mention this because I'd be curious to know what the memory and
> > running time (big-O) of diff is.
>
> That's discussed in the references, at least in theory.

It's not in the manpage, and I didn't see anything in the info pages, either.
Can you generalize off-hand?

> > My experience suggests that you can't run diff against anything
> > larger than a few 10's of MB before the program's memory usage
> > exceeds MAXDSIZE on a 32-bit platform.
>
> It depends on the data.  Here's an example where it runs reasonably
> fast on a 32-bit host (2.4 GHz P4).  Admittedly not every case is this
> fast....

Absolutely.  diff doesn't seem to be slow working on large files, even on much 
slower hardware.

--
-Chuck