The Lua interpreter and large scripts

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

  I've noticed some strange behavior with the Lua interpreter [1].  I'm
trying to load two scripts, one is 1101 bytes in size (just dumps the
contents of a table) and the other one is 83414279 bytes in size (yes,
80M---generated by a C program and contains a *really* large table of around
80,000 items [2]).

[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>ll
total 81548
-rw-------  1 spc spc 83414279 Nov 10 05:30 default.lua
-rw-r--r--  1 spc spc     1101 Nov 10 05:30 show.lua

  Okay.  

[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("show.lua")
> dofile("default.lua")
> os.exit()

real    0m16.130s
user    0m6.311s
sys     0m0.365s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua -i default.lua 
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("show.lua")
> os.exit()

real    0m12.354s	# file is probably cached at this point
user    0m6.293s
sys     0m0.413s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua -i show.lua 
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("default.lua")
> os.exit()

real    5m49.052s	# okay ... what happened?
user    5m43.279s
sys     0m0.577s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>

  I can work around this, but I'm very curious as to why it's happening.

  -spc (Who finds this very odd behavior ... )

[1]	Linux 2.6, dual core Pentium-4 2.6GHz with a 1G of RAM

[2]	Basically, an index of all the headers from over 80,000 messages
	from 2,300 files (of which the names, sizes and timestamps are
	saved as well in the table).