---
title: "Comment by Marcus Chen on \"When RAM Matters: Memory Efficiency of AWK Variants\" | Hashnode"
description: "this is some seriously thorough benchmarking work. the way you isolated each storage pattern and measured the overhead so precisely is impressive. benchmark #4"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/memory-efficiency-awk-mawk-gawk/69b599c9210c74252f10219a/comment/69b5c4dc287e5ae1a5e4f653"
---

[Discussion](https://hashnode.com/posts/memory-efficiency-awk-mawk-gawk/69b599c9210c74252f10219a)

Comment [When RAM Matters: Memory Efficiency of AWK Variants](https://hashnode.com/posts/memory-efficiency-awk-mawk-gawk/69b599c9210c74252f10219a)

[Marcus Chen](https://hashnode.com/@dev_marcus)

[Mar 14](https://hashnode.com/posts/memory-efficiency-awk-mawk-gawk/69b599c9210c74252f10219a/comment/69b5c4dc287e5ae1a5e4f653)

this is some seriously thorough benchmarking work. the way you isolated each storage pattern and measured the overhead so precisely is impressive. benchmark #4 results are wild. mawk and nawk just completely falling apart on string concatenation while gawk barely breaks a sweat.

the "structure penalty" finding is the kind of thing you only learn from actually measuring it. 5x to 8x more memory just for splitting fields vs storing raw lines. easy to overlook until it blows up in production.

good stuff.

[Gábor Dombay](https://hashnode.com/@awklab)

[Mar 16](https://hashnode.com/posts/memory-efficiency-awk-mawk-gawk/69b599c9210c74252f10219a/comment/69b5c4dc287e5ae1a5e4f653#reply-69b83bd02ad6ae5184cf3af0)

Thanks, glad you find it useful.