From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T01:02:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

On Monday 22 May 2006 9:25 am, Madan Manoharan wrote:
> On 5/22/06, benjohn@fysh.org <benjohn@fysh.org> wrote:
> > I just want to point out why it doesn't (pragmatically) matter to me
> > personally atm.
>
> Unfortunately, not all of us are in your boat. I really like Ruby, but
> if performance improvement is not going to be in Ruby's near future,
> my management is not going to buy into Ruby!

The thing that always stands out to me in these performance discussions is 
that people argue that Ruby needs a performance improvement, but there are 
rarely any specifics attached to that analysis.

How much of speed improvement?  How fast should Ruby be?  For what?

I like speed in my applications.  It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.  However 
Ruby's speed has never been a problem for me, and I have been using Ruby in 
enterprise applications, for at least some definitions of enterprise, for 4 
years.

On really very modest hardware it is no problem for me to dynamically generate 
web pages for sites/applications fast enough that it could handle _millions_ 
of hits a day.  That is, if I can optimize away the cost of most database 
interactions through caching or other mechanisms.  Ruby could be 10x faster, 
and if I have to make database queries with each request, it's not going to 
matter, because Ruby isn't the bottleneck, most of the time.

I do a lot of data/file generation/handling/transformation/transport duties 
with Ruby, and Ruby is never the bottleneck.

I do email build/send tasks with Ruby, and Ruby isn't the bottleneck.  In 
fact, I have a number of years experience in the dynamic, targetted email 
business, and my relatively simple Ruby based email build platform is more 
powerful, easier to use, and faster than the quite expensive (in developer 
hours spent to build/optimize it) Java based system that my last employer 
used.

Ruby can be a bottleneck, but for the vast majority of Ruby users and the vast 
majority of tasks people use if for, it is not the bottleneck.

It is not an elephant in the living room that everyone is ignoring if the 
performance simply isn't a limiting factor.  It's an elephant out in the 
paddock, where it belongs in those cases.  And those cases are the majority 
of cases.


Kirk Haines