From: David Garamond <lists@...6.isreserved.com>
Date: 2004-06-21T16:52:00+09:00
Subject: Re: rubys web performance

Florian Weber wrote:
> its not really a issue with rails..
> 
> its a issue with the performance ruby reads and compiles files..
> 
> see my email before about how i tested it. there i only required to
> files. no rails stuff going on..

note: php 4.3.6, ruby 1.8.1, both on Linux

<<<
* 0 line of code:

$ time ruby -v; # 0.023s
$ time php -v; # 0.037s (note: only mysql.so dynamic PHP extension is 
loaded; but several exts are builtin)

* 1 line of code:

$ echo '<? echo "Hello, world!\n" ?>' | time php -q; # 0.037s
$ time ruby -e'puts "Hello, world!"'; # 0.023s

* +- 1750 lines of PHP code:

$ time php /usr/share/pear/System.php; # 0.058s
$ wc System.php PEAR.php Console/Getopt.php
     540    2002   17972 System.php
     975    3290   30154 PEAR.php
     251    1084    9536 Console/Getopt.php
    1766    6376   57662 total

* +- 2600 lines of Ruby code:

$ time ruby cgi.rb; # 0.065s
$ wc cgi.rb English.rb delegate.rb
    2318    9250   75713 cgi.rb
     155     855    5732 English.rb
     139     322    2942 delegate.rb
    2612   10427   84387 total
 >>>


Conclusion: Not disappointing for Ruby...

The problem is, for simple CGI web app, thousands of Ruby lines 
typically need to be parsed & compiled, while only several lines are 
needed for PHP (due to PHP extensions are in the form of compiled 
machine code).

Hope things will get better with Cardinal or Ruby2... Overhead of 
scripting languages compilation (esp. Perl & Ruby, since those doesn't 
fully support precompiled code) almost always force me to make 
persistent/long-running processes/daemons (which have problems of their 
own), or go to C (which I can't stand :-).

For example, for an SMTPD I have to ditch qpsmtpd (since the script runs 
via tcpserver, i.e. needs to be forked on every request) and make my own 
Perl daemon. The overhead would just really burden my machine.

-- 
dave