Using these programs, you can:

- test the speed of patterns in user space.
- test whether your pattern matches random data (which is bad!).

Note that these are fairly crude tests.  They are not certain to reflect
actual network performance.

Start by saying "make".

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To test the speed of the pattern in the file "foo.pat": 

./timeit.sh foo.pat all <-- for random characters
./timeit.sh foo.pat print <-- for printable characters only
./timeit.sh foo.pat real <-- to test against a set of real data

Or to test the pattern "foo|bar":                       

./timeit.sh 'foo|bar' all|print|real

You'll find that our regexp library has some performance quirks.  Things
we've noticed:

- Branches are very expensive.  Testing for "foo|bar" takes much
longer than twice as long as testing for "foo".  

- Parentheses aren't optimized out.  "(foo)" takes much longer than "foo".

- "^(foo|bar)" is much faster than "^foo|^bar".

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To test whether your pattern matches random data, run

./test_match.sh foo.pat
or
./test_match.sh 'foo|bar'
