From: David Ross <dross@...>
Date: 2004-10-27T10:36:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Server Programming

David G. Andersen wrote:

>On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:04:07AM +0900, Andy Stone scribed:
>  
>
>>Would you say it's slower in processing text files?  A single file can
>>run a few megabytes. That's where I was hoping to gain some speed from
>>Ruby.  I was thinking that Ruby would be a little slower in other
>>aspects, but thought that I would make up considerable ground with the
>>parsing process.
>>    
>>
>
>Another view on this:
>
>I just rewrote a lot of data processing scripts in Ruby.  The
>prior version was a mix of perl with a few speed-critical
>functions implemented as standalone C programs.  I _do_
>care about speed with these -- a full analysis run on the
>data we've got right now takes about a day and a half -- but
>I also cared a lot about getting the programs done in time
>for a conference deadline.  The data is about 32 gigs gzipped.
>
>The new version is about the same speed as the prior version, or
>just a bit slower, because it's done right, and it was easier to
>do right -- but doing line processing with Ruby 1.8 (which doesn't
>have the new oniguruma regexp library) is noticably slower than
>doing the same thing in perl if you're doing a lot of
>
>  if (l =~ /pattern/) ...
>
>Doing it right resulted in the memory footprint dropping from
>about 500MB to 7MB, which was pleasant, and avoiding some
>stupidity in the perl code (which was pretty entrenched)
>sped things up enough to compensate for the slowdowns. 
>I'm _very_ glad I took the time to rewrite it.  I had to
>do a few workarounds to avoid particular slowdowns in 
>Ruby (see my earlier thread about zlib slowness, in particular),
>but it wasn't onerous.
>
>But if you ignore programmer effort and the possibility
>of better program structure, comparing the raw speed of
>a JITted Java to Ruby is probably going to come down on the
>side of Java.  Of course, if you can easily implement your
>"inner loop" functionality in C, you could always quickly
>swig it and 'require' it from within ruby. :)
>
>Interested to hear what you think after the project.
>
>  -Dave
>
>  
>
War stories. I wonder if theres already a page for it on RubyGarden, if 
not it should be created. I'd love to hear about people who converted 
program(s) from <that language> to Ruby. It would be interesting and 
benificial to the community. Also it would encourage more to convert as 
well.

David Ross
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