Serviio

I was wondering why one of my plugins was taking so long to refresh so by adding log messages to each step of the code I timed it and found.

Due to this regex
Extracts took 5 sec each

Now with this regex
Extracts take 1 sec each!

Can you believe it?
Can you explain it?

the regex is different, so that's why

So you don't understand regex either?
Kinda important when the big issue with Serviio is the time required to constantly refresh all the online feeds even if they are not being used.

It's called lazy quantifiers. http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/regex/regex-greed.html

I'm not sure how it's implemented in Groovy/Java, but it looks like it's slower than greedy expression. Use it only if you need it.

My conclusion is opposite to yours, and lazy will stop as soon as it gets a match whereas greedy will continue and then backtrack.

I'm only using lazy so it should be fast and I read (?s).*?'file'.*?'(.*?)' as read the html string up to 'file' and then up to the next ' and then capture to the next quote and stop. However I read (?s)'file'.*?'(.*?)' the same way but it takes 5 times longer so something is different.

i can see that first regex has 4 pattens and second only 3. that might explain difference in performance. i guess execution of each pattern takes extra time.