Performance measurably (although probably not noticeably) improved for
locus-0.8, compiled with gcc 2.8.1. Time to index 9 772 883 bytes
of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is now 26 minutes.
locus-0.64 (and later) - compiled with gcc 2.8.0, which can compile my
convoluted C++ with optimizations enabled (as opposed to gcc 2.7.2.3) - is
a definite improvement over the previous version. Time to index
9 772 883 bytes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
went from 62 to 29 minutes.
Time/size dependency is pretty linear. I guess it stays linear till you
have RAM, but surely not forever: 49 752 228 bytes of VIRUS-L archive takes
almost 6 hours (5 hr 43 min, to be precise). Here, disk writes are the
bottleneck (stop list cuts the time to 4 hr 45 min).
Of course, many more tests should be done, but I'm too lazy. If you do your
own measurements, I'll gladly include them here.