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I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck

by Modestas Valauskas modulovalue.com published 2026-01-1319 min read

Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
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Systems & PerformanceSoftware Engineering2026

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Jan 20, 2026I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck by modulovalue18792

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