Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:

>> I did some trivial benchmarking with
>>
>> (while (search-backward "\n(defun " nil t)))
>>
>> and the equivalent re-search-backward in a buffer in a loop, and the
>> search-backward version was about 8x faster.
>
> How did you measure that?  When I tried I did not see any significant
> difference.

I just call the stuff I want to benchmark a gazillion times with my tiny
benchmark.el package:

(benchmark 10000 (goto-char (point-min)) (while (search-forward "\n(defun " nil t) (forward-line 1)))