The Adblock Project

[AmirG]

With my Firefox getting noticeably slower, I thought I'd try to optimize my Adblock filterset. For this I need to know which filters are more efficient.

Would a simple filter, e.g. "http://abc.com/*", be more efficient than it's regex equivalent, "/http:\/\/abc\.com\/"? How about "/\/abc\.com\/"?

Which filterset is more efficient, "http://*abc.com/*", "http://abc.com/*" and "http://www.abc.com/*" or "/\/(www.)?abc\.com\//"?

The regex "/abc(de|fg)/" is obviously more efficient than "/abcde/" and "/abcfg/", but is there any performance difference between "/(tu|vw)xyz/" and the pair of "/tuxyz/" and "/vwxyz/"?

[mcm_ham]

http://aasted.org/adblock/viewtopic.php?t=1626

[AmirG]

So I should've been searching for "speed" instead of "efficien*"?

Thanks, but that thread doesn't really answer my questions, it only made me confused.

[DEFIANT]

http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/
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The Ur-Quan Masters

[AmirG]

Thanks, but that's not what I was asking for. I have my own filterset that is suitable for the sites I visit and is much shorter than filterset G. I want to make my filterset more efficient, not more effective.

[Guest]

A good idea to detect the better filters

http://aasted.org/adblock/viewtopic.php?t=1925

[AmirG]

And that also wasn't what I was asking about, but that thread is quite interesting, so thanks anyway.

[wonkothesane]

AmirG:

When matching against strings of lengths commonly found for URLs (e.g. less than 200 characters), compiled regular expressions are ever-so-slightly faster than "simple filters", at least in 0.5.

However, the impact any given filter's syntax is far outweighed by the extra code Adblock has to execute to match the filter at all. That is to say, shortening your filterlist may give you a speed boost, whereas switching between "abc.com/" and "/http://abc.com/" will not.

[AmirG]

Thanks.

Just one more question: does shortening includes concatenating several filters together, eg. combining "/abc/" and "/xyz/" to "/(abc|xyz)/"?

[kstahl]

Yes, in theory. Unless you have a very long list I doubt you will see any real difference in practice though.
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[AmirG]

So it doesn't really matter. Thanks again.