Could be to do with where you're searching. The fact that ag skips everything in your .gitignore seems to have helped when I tested. Both of these were run at t

Could be to do with where you're searching. The fact that ag skips everything in your .gitignore seems to have helped when I tested. Both of these were run at the root of my projects directory... $ time grep -r f_admin . 35.87s user 6.50s system 65% cpu 1:04.47 total $ time ag f_admin 1.51s user 4.94s system 196% cpu 3.284 total