Strange gawk discrepancy

[Charles Kozierok]

Hi folks,

I'm a fairly experienced awk/gawk programmer who does a lot of script
writing. I mostly use gawk in the Windows environment (boo/hiss/etc.
:) ) but also on FreeBSD.

Anyway, strange problem. I made an application for a client which
works pretty quick on my PC, but is *really* slow. His hardware is
basically better than mine, but where the script will process a set of
data in under 20 minutes on my machine, on his it takes over 20 hours!
It also seems to slow down more as it goes.

I can't imagine the PC version being inherently faster.

He's running 3.1.5 and I'm at 3.1.6. Could that make that much difference?

Could there be a memory leak or something only on the *nix version?

Thanks for any advice,

Charles