From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-08-13T00:06:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Performance

Bradley Kite wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is
> trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already offer
> (Apart from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting
> language, that is).
> The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a lot
> considering it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below).
>
> I was also interested in comparing the performance of Ruby against
> something like Perl, and (although this test is VERY simple) thought
> that I'd benchmark
> a simple counter in both Ruby and Perl. The number that it counts to
> is arbitrary,
> I started with 4294967296 and kept reducing it because I got bored of
> waiting). Code is provided below.
>
> Any way, on a 3Ghz P4 CPU, I got the following results:
>
> Perl:
> real    0m24.569s
> user    0m24.499s
> sys     0m0.068s
>
> Ruby:
> real    0m57.218s
> user    0m57.108s
> sys     0m0.109s
>
> (Just out of interest I did it in C as well):
>
> (Average Run, non-optimised)
> real    0m0.142s
> user    0m0.136s
> sys     0m0.005s
>
> (Average Run, -O3 optimisations):
> real    0m0.074s
> user    0m0.070s
> sys     0m0.004s
>
> ##################################
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> my $num = 0;
>
> while ($num < 94967295)
> {
>     $num += 1;
> }
>
> ###############
>
> #!/usr/bin/ruby
> num = 0
>
> while num < 94967295 do
>     num += 1
> end
>
> ###############
>
> int main()
> {
>     int counter = 0;
>
>     while (counter < 94967295)
>     {
>         counter += 1;
>     }
> }

Just out of curiosity: did you also benchmark these Ruby idioms (which I
regard more typical):

94967295.times do
end

for i in 0..94967295 do
end

0.upto 94967295 do
end

Kind regards

    robert