grep like molbuttes

Has anybody else noticed an incredible slowness in grep 2.5.1? (On RedHat 9, but I don't know how general this is)

I have a spam filter (of my own) that generates a log looking like this:

.... Subj: =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCQmZPUSQsRnxLXCQsYkMwJiRHJDkkaBsoQg==?=( :-) Probable Spam! (p=1.0000) Subj: Re: Visit Looks OK (p=0.9999) ....

(The first will have gone to a spam-can, the second to my mailbox.)

And I have a script that simply counts the entries of each type in the log:

#!bin-sh echo -n 'Accepted:' grep -c 'Looks OK' ~-Mail-spamlog echo -n 'Rejected:' grep -c 'Probable Spam' ~-Mail-spamlog

Running this on an almost 8000-line file, the first grep returns a value of 160 0r so in about 1-2 sec (a bit slow for a 2.4GHz box...), but the second one takes nearly 10 sec to return the 3700 or so spam hits!

I have my own little app ('matt') that can be asked to do the same thing, but it's not line-oriented like grep, so it's normally rather slower. However, on this machine, if I replace 'grep' by 'matt' in the above script, I get the answers instantaneously!

This phenomenon seems to have been coincident with bringing up this new server. I never noticed it on the older (RH 7) box, but it's no longer around to check... However, I hauled the log file over to my BeOS (:-)) machine that runs grep 2.0, and sure enough it was also essentially instantaneous. So something is really odd with this installation. Does anyone have any idea what it might be?

-- Pete --

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