From: "ivoanjo (Ivo Anjo)" <noreply@...>
Date: 2021-11-03T12:06:39+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:105917] [Ruby master Misc#18285] NoMethodError#message uses a lot of CPU/is really expensive to call

Issue #18285 has been updated by ivoanjo (Ivo Anjo).


> Well I for one complained about that limit, hence why I opened the ticket.

Right! Thanks for pointing it out.

> Also note that the limit would still have called #inspect, just not used the result, so unless I'm missing something, you could truncate Error#message yourself and have roughly the same performance.

Good point. What I meant was that for a long time it seemed OK to not get the `#inspect` information some of the time, so I was trying to use that to make a case that perhaps the default should not be to use `#inspect`, not to use the inspect always :)

One additional note is that if one needs it, it's possible to get the `#inspect` information because the exception exposes the reference to the original object:

```ruby
[1] pry(main)> exception = begin; "hello".foo; rescue => e; e; end
=> #<NoMethodError: undefined method `foo' for "hello":String>
[3] pry(main)> exception.receiver
=> "hello"
[4] pry(main)> exception.receiver.inspect
=> "\"hello\""
```


----------------------------------------
Misc #18285: NoMethodError#message uses a lot of CPU/is really expensive to call
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18285#change-94460

* 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  (�� 1.7%) i/s -    580.000  in   5.027822s
runtime error message cost
                          6.938M (�� 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  (�� 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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