TL;DR mawk is fast. gawk is not.

Then you might be interested in this:
http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/

(apologies if if you've already seent it)

On Mon, 9 Apr 2012, J Cruit wrote:

> Actually I quite like the awk and sed cheat sheets, still two of my
> favorite tools for dealing with log analysis and pulling out fun stuff
> from text.
>
> --j
>
> On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 1:58 PM,  <canito at dalan.us> wrote:
>> Scroll to the bottom of page, under cheat sheets:
>>
>> http://www.catonmat.net/projects/
>>
>> D
>>
>> Quoting Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> On Mon, 9 Apr 2012, canito at dalan.us wrote:
>>>
>>>> A colleague of mine was "researching" on the web, when he came across a
>>>> command line cheat sheet. I thought I would share one of the commands we
>>>> thought to be most cool & interesting.
>>>
>>>
>>> Where did you find it?
>>>
>>> Mike

-- 
Gerry Skerbitz
gsker at skerbitz.org