Forums Bug Reports /filter slow for some wildcard search strings

Believe it or not, it's normal. For example, you have a string W containing 5 * chars and you want to compare it against a 20-char string A. Each * can match from 0 to 20 chars (at most), so the number of ways W can match A is of the order of 20^5 (it's smaller, even in the worst case, but still grows exponentially with the number of *'s). In the worst case, mirc will have to do several thousands char-by-char comparisons to determine if those innocent-looking strings W and A match! So while it's possible that the wildcard matching routine could be optimised a bit, don't expect any dramatic improvements in general; in certain cases, early termination of the matching process is possible but this cannot be generalised to apply to every case.