From: Mark Somerville <mark@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T21:09:47+09:00
Subject: Re: How to Improve Performance Now. Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb onRuby's poor performance

On Tuesday 23 May 2006 12:41, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On 5/22/06, John Carter <john.carter@tait.co.nz> wrote:
> > Ruby is based on gcc, gcc has grown some nifty ways of speeding things
> > up.
>
> No. Ruby is *not* based on gcc. Ruby is based on ANSI C. Any
> GCC-specific performanced boosts would reduce Ruby's portability.
>
> > Currently Ruby is compiled -O2 usually for generic i386
> >
> > Obvious answers
> >   - Compile -O3, gcc, especially since version 4.0 has grown some really
> > nifty optimizations. Almost the whole point of version gcc 4
>
> Be careful that those optimizations don't omit stack frames. You'll
> get an unusable Ruby.
>
> > Ruby is _not_ gcc warning clean. Some gcc warnings are actually
> > performance related.
>
> Ruby should try to be clean on all compilers that don't try to give
> you warnings about compiler-specific things (like Visual Studio's new
> warnings about deprecated functions like printf).
>
> All that said, the best thing one can do to improve the performance of
> one's Ruby script is to have hard numbers about where your script is
> performing poorly and being absolutely *certain* that it's Ruby and
> not your algorithm. (That is, I know exactly why PDF::Writer is as
> dramatically slow as it is; I just don't have a fix for it, yet.)

Can anyone recommend some good or tutorials on profiling and benchmarking? 
Although I have used them both (from the standard library), I feel I lack 
fundamental knowledge about how to go about it.

Mark

>
> -austin