I am trying to understand some performance issues related to sed and awk, and I did the following experiment,

$ seq 100000 > test
$ yes 'NR==100001print' | head -n 5000 > test.awk
$ yes '100001p;b' | head -n 5000 > test.sed
$ time sed -nf test.sed test
real 0m3.436s
user 0m3.428s
sys 0m0.004s
$ time awk -F@ -f test.awk test
real 0m11.615s
user 0m11.582s
sys 0m0.007s
$ sed --version
sed (GNU sed) 4.5
$ awk --version
GNU Awk 4.2.1, API: 2.0 (GNU MPFR 3.1.6-p2, GNU MP 6.1.2)

Here, since the test file only contains 100000 lines, all the commands in test.sed and test.awk are no-ops. Both programs only need to match the line number with the address (in sed) or NR(in awk) to decide that the command does not need to be executed, but there is still a huge difference in the time cost. Why is it the case? Are there anyone with different versions of sed and awk installed that gives a different result on this test?

Edit:
The results for mawk (as suggested by @mosvy), original-awk(the name for "one true awk" at debian based systems, suggested by @GregA.Woods) and perl are given below,

$ time mawk -F@ -f test.awk test
real 0m5.934s
user 0m5.919s
sys 0m0.004s
$ time original-awk -F@ -f test.awk test
real 0m8.132s
user 0m8.128s
sys 0m0.004s
$ yes 'print if $.==100001;' | head -n 5000 > test.pl
$ time perl -n test.pl test
real 0m33.245s
user 0m33.110s
sys 0m0.019s
$ mawk -W version
mawk 1.3.4 20171017
$ perl --version
This is perl 5, version 28, subversion 1 (v5.28.1) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi

Replacing -F@ with -F '' does not make observable changes in the case of gawk and mawk. original-awk does not support empty FS.

Edit 2
The test by @mosvy gives different results, 21s for sed and 11s for mawk, see the comment below for details.

awk has a wider feature set than sed, with a more flexible syntax. So it's not unreasonable that it'll take longer both to parse its scripts, and to execute them.

As your example command (the part inside the braces) never runs, the time-sensitive part should be your test expression.

awk

First, look at the test in the awk example:

NR==100001

and see the effects of that in gprof (GNU awk 4.0.1):

 % cumulative self self total
 time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
 55.89 19.73 19.73 1 19.73 35.04 interpret
 8.90 22.87 3.14 500000000 0.00 0.00 cmp_scalar
 8.64 25.92 3.05 1000305023 0.00 0.00 free_wstr
 8.61 28.96 3.04 500105014 0.00 0.00 mk_number
 6.09 31.11 2.15 500000001 0.00 0.00 cmp_nodes
 4.18 32.59 1.48 500200013 0.00 0.00 unref
 3.68 33.89 1.30 500000000 0.00 0.00 eval_condition
 2.21 34.67 0.78 500000000 0.00 0.00 update_NR

~50% of the time is spent in "interpret", the top-level loop to run the opcodes resulting from the parsed script.

Every time the test is run (ie. 5000 script lines * 100000 input lines), awk has to:

• Fetch the built-in variable "NR" (update_NR).


• Convert the string "100001" (mk_number).


• Compare them (cmp_nodes, cmp_scalar, eval_condition).


• Discard any temporary objects needed for the comparison (free_wstr, unref)

Other awk implementations won't have the exact same call flow, but they will still have to retrieve variables, automatically convert, then compare.

sed

By comparison, in sed, the "test" is much more limited. It can only be a single address, an address range, or nothing (when the command is the first thing on the line), and sed can tell from the first character whether it's an address or command. In the example, it's

100001

...a single numerical address. The profile (GNU sed 4.2.2) shows

 % cumulative self self total
 time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
 52.01 2.98 2.98 100000 0.00 0.00 execute_program
 44.16 5.51 2.53 1000000000 0.00 0.00 match_address_p
 3.84 5.73 0.22 match_an_address_p
[...]
 0.00 5.73 0.00 5000 0.00 0.00 in_integer

Again, ~50% of the time is in the top-level execute_program. In this case, it's called once per input line, then loops over the parsed commands. The loop starts with an address check.

The important comparison, match_address_p, is also called 2*5000*100000 times[^1], but it only compares integers that are already available (through structs and pointers).

The line numbers in the input script were parsed at compile-time (in_integer). That only has to be done once for each address number in the input, ie. 5000 times, and doesn't make a significant contribution to the overall running time.

[^1]: I'm not entirely sure why 2x yet, but the braces make a difference. When the lines read 100001p, it's only once per script*input line. 100001p uses 2x.

Actually the above script is not a noop for awk:

Even if you do not use the contents of the fields, according to GAWK manual for each record that is read in the following steps are inevitably performed:

• scanning for all occurrences of the FS


• field splitting


• updating th NF variable

If you are not using this information it just gets discarded afterwards.

If a field separator does not occur within the record, awk still has to assign text to $0 (and in your case to $1, too), and set NF to the actual number of obtained fields (1 in the sample above)