Problems with combinate (-a 1) attack mode.

Hello everyone! I have confused with hashcat speed of this attack mode.
Look. I created my own script for generating passwords. Everything working fine, password successfully restored. But I have problems with speed, which magically decrease in 1000x. Depence on which side dict is.

Full command: hashcat -a 1 -m 26600 -d 1 -w 4 $metamask$hash credentials.txt rules/main.dict. (and hashcat -a 1 -m 26600 -d 1 -w 4 $metamask$hash rules/main.dict credentials.txt also).

So yes, I found that this mode only connect right side, not both. So I decided to mix dictionaries manually. Look at the difference in speed:



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So the questions:
1) Why this is happens?
2) Am I miss any flag that can ask hashcat to combinate "/rules/main.dict" in start and end?
3) If there is no solution to combinate in start and end of password and I forced to run hashcat two times, can I fix this difference in speed?


Thank you very much for your knowledge and your time!

  left side.png (Size: 212.6 KB / Downloads: 6)

  right side.png (Size: 91.98 KB / Downloads: 8)