Usenet Registry Fun

Which is faster? The registry or a text configuration file. The question has been raised several times on the comp.os.linux.advoacy and several other UNIX newsgroups. I opted to do some amateur investigation and came up with a program that reads and writes 100 configuraiton values both

• In the registry as key-value pairs under a single key inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Craig and
• As an old-fasioned text file stored with key-value pairs separated by an equal (=) sign.

Here are the results:

G:\work\programming>reg_test.pl
Writing config file took about 6 seconds.
Reading config file took about 4 seconds.
Writing registry vals took about 26 seconds.
Reading registry vals took about 8 seconds.

As you can see, the registry is substantially slower in this test. I didn't plan on using any known weaknesses or strengths in writing these tests, so if there are then they are not intentional. Here's a listing of the source and result files:

• The resulting text configuration file config.dat
• The resulting registry export of our key reg_results.reg
• The perl source regtest.pl

This only proves that using the registry in this manner with Perl is slower than using a text configuration file in this manner with Perl.

Here is a C version that was written by Kelsey Bjarnason; I converted it into a visual studio 6 project

• Browse VS Project
• Download VS Project zip file
• Download the optimized regtest.exe

Release build:
FileTest took 4.000000 seconds
RegTest took 18.000000 seconds

Debug build:
FileTest took 3.000000 seconds
RegTest took 19.000000 seconds

Release build again:
FileTest took 5.000000 seconds
RegTest took 18.000000 seconds

Although I don't think this test is as fair as the perl test because it doesn't force the text file to parse any configuration names (it just stores the values); but it shows that perl isn't the problem when it comes to speed issues.