performance is very slow

[dudicoco]

When processing a lot of files with yq, the performance impact is noticeable:

for f in $files; do
  yq '.' $file
done

It takes around 15 seconds to process 650 files, while jq takes around 1-2 seconds.

[SethMMorton]

Do you see the same magnitude of slowness if you do e.g.

yq '.' "${files[@]}"

?

I wonder if you are just measuring the Python startup time instead of the tool performance.

[kislyuk]

yq is subject to performance limitations of Python and PyYAML (in plain Python parsing mode, since yq makes a number of customizations to the parsing process). There are no plans to dedicate resources to improving performance beyond what will be available in future versions of Python. As @SethMMorton correctly points out, streaming multiple documents (separated by ---) can amortize the startup time. PRs to improve performance are welcome.