[ruby-core:105911] [Ruby master Misc#18285] NoMethodError#message uses a lot of CPU/is really expensive to call

Issue #18285 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).


I think we've had this report multiple times, it's a trade-off between efficiency and useful information being shown.
Ideally `#inspect` wouldn't be so expensive.

NoMethodError is typically because the method isn't defined on the class of that instance, and very rarely because it's not defined on the singleton class of that instance (except if it's a Module/Class).

So I think one good fix here would be to use the basic Kernel#to_s to format the receiver, i.e., rb_any_to_s() and with special handling for true/false/nil, and also for modules (show the module name).
Then we wouldn't lose too much information from the exception (the class of the object would still be obvious) and avoid the drawbacks.

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Misc #18285: NoMethodError#message uses a lot of CPU/is really expensive to call
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18285#change-94454

* Author: ivoanjo (Ivo Anjo)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
----------------------------------------
Hello there! I'm working at Datadog on the ddtrace gem -- https://github.com/DataDog/dd-trace-rb and we ran into this issue on one of our internal testing applications. I also blogged about this issue in <https://ivoanjo.me/blog/2021/11/01/nomethoderror-ruby-cost/>.

### Background

While testing an application that threw a lot of `NoMethodError`s in a Rails controller (this was used for validation), we discovered that service performance was very much impacted when we were logging these exceptions. While investigating with a profiler, the performance impact was caused by calls to `NoMethodError#message`, because this Rails controller had a quite complex `#inspect` method, that was getting called every time we tried to get the `#message` from the exception.

### How to reproduce

```ruby
require 'bundler/inline'

gemfile do
  source 'https://rubygems.org'

  gem 'benchmark-ips'
end

puts RUBY_DESCRIPTION

class GemInformation
  # ...

  def get_no_method_error
    method_does_not_exist
  rescue => e
    e
  end

  def get_runtime_error
    raise 'Another Error'
  rescue => e
    e
  end

  def inspect # <-- expensive method gets called when calling NoMethodError#message
    Gem::Specification._all.inspect
  end
end

NO_METHOD_ERROR_INSTANCE = GemInformation.new.get_no_method_error
RUNTIME_ERROR_INSTANCE = GemInformation.new.get_runtime_error

Benchmark.ips do |x|
  x.config(:time => 5, :warmup => 2)

  x.report("no method error message cost") { NO_METHOD_ERROR_INSTANCE.message }
  x.report("runtime error message cost") { RUNTIME_ERROR_INSTANCE.message }

  x.compare!
end
```

### Expectation and result

Getting the `#message` from a `NoMethodError` should be no costly than getting it from any other exception.

In reality:

```
ruby 3.0.2p107 (2021-07-07 revision 0db68f0233) [x86_64-linux]

no method error message cost
                        115.390  (賊 1.7%) i/s -    580.000  in   5.027822s
runtime error message cost
                          6.938M (賊 0.5%) i/s -     35.334M in   5.092617s

Comparison:
runtime error message cost:  6938381.6 i/s
no method error message cost:      115.4 i/s - 60130.02x  (賊 0.00) slower
```

### Suggested solutions

1. Do not call `#inspect` on the object on which the method was not found (see <https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/e0915ba67964d843832148aeca29a1f8244ca7b1/error.c#L1962>)
2. Cache result of calling `#message` after the first call. Ideally this should be done together with suggestion 1.




-- 
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