egrep in redhat 8.0 is painfully slow.

[ik4sp]

I tried to replace version of RedHat 7.3 with version 8.0.
Installation was fine on 2CPU box with 1G of memory. All functionality
is here. But egrep is painfully slow compare to version 7.3.

On ver 7.3 system using 235Meg file
cat foo | wc –l 2 sec
egrep '^' foo| wc –l 3sec

On ver 8.0 system using 30Meg file
cat foo | wc –l instant
egrep '^' foo| wc –l over 10 min !!!

And it is not disk subsystem itself – copying time is the same or
better. When egrep is running only one CPU use going to95%+. Is it MP
issue? Unfortunately I have some scripts heavily relying on egrep. Is
anybody having any idea what it could be, please advice.