From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-03-28T02:15:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Speed issue on Windows

On 3/26/06, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
> > Try running the built-in sample "cal.rb" with ruby -rprofile.
> > I don't have two identical boxes right next to each other right now, but:
> > WinXP SP2, dual Xeon 2.8GHz, 2GB of RAM: 5.031 seconds.
> > Ubuntu 5.10, single P4 3.0GHz, 1GB of RAM: 2.110 seconds.
> >
> > Obviously the hardware isn't the same, but they should be much, much
> > closer than that.
> > cal.rb is a good choice (in my opinion) because it creates and
> > compares a very large number of Rational and Fixnum objects.
>
> 4.94 sec   WinXP SP2, single Pentium M, 1.7GHz, 512MB
>             1-click installer
>
> 2.32 sec   Ubuntu 5.10, single Pentium M, 1.7GHz, 512MB
>             built with default build options
>
> I took the best run out of 10 or so on each platform. Not building the
> windows version with architecture specific options might account for
> some of the difference.
>

I just built several versions of Ruby 1.8.4 using various
optimizations, including -G7 -Ox (target P4/Xeon architecture, maximum
optimization), and compared them to the binaries from ruby-mswin32 and
the one click installer.
They all actually performed slightly worse than the default settings.

Looks like it's not a problem with the compiler flags (which seem finely tuned).
I also tried throwing "WITHOUT_PTHREADS" into the Makefile, but since
it's not a configure.bat option on Win32, I wasn't surprised when it
didn't change anything.

--Wilson.