Thanks for benchmarking ag against grep. You're right that it's not exactly apples to apples. Ag doesn't search as many files, but it does parse and match again

Thanks for benchmarking ag against grep. You're right that it's not exactly apples to apples. Ag doesn't search as many files, but it does parse and match against rules in .ag/.git/.hgignore. Also, ag prints line numbers by default, which can be an expensive operation on larger files. I think most of the slowdown you're seeing with "find -exec | cat" is forking at least two processes (ag and cat) for each file. Also, each process has to be run sequentially (to prevent garbled output), which makes use of only one CPU core most of the time. I've tried to keep ag's startup time fast so that classic find-style commands still run quickly. (This is why ag doesn't support a ~/.agrc or similar.) Just FYI, you can use ag --stat to see how many files/bytes were searched, how long it took, etc. I think I'll add some stats about obeying ignore rules, since some of those can be outright pathological in terms of runtime cost. In many cases, ag spends more time figuring out what to search than actually searching.