Forums Bug Reports /filter slow for some wildcard search strings

I don't understand why you're so confused about why the first alias is slower than the second. Matching against over a dozen wildcards versus matching a single wildcard anchored at the end of a string is obviously going to produce vastly different results.

Your logic comparing matching wildcards versus using tokens doesn't make sense. Using tokens the algorithm knows that there is a token separator and what it is. Using wildcards it knows no such thing, all it knows is that there are given characters separated by any number of characters (including that character), so it's not at all like providing tokens. I have no idea if mIRC's internal wildcard algorithm attempts to match * greedily or ungreedily, I'd guess it's greedy and maybe if that were changed it might improve your results somewhat. But then it might also make other wildcard matches far slower. Of course this is all pure speculation on my part.


That's not 6 milliseconds, that's six seconds. $ctime returns a value in seconds since the "UNIX epoch" (00:00:00 January 1st 1970 GMT). If you want a value in milliseconds use $ticks (although that still only has an accurate resolution of approximately 10ms).