From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-07-03T18:42:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Rails performance profiling?

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On 7/2/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
>
>
> > There's a
> > limit to the amount of server RAM I'm willing to buy, power, and cool
> > just
> > to run bloatware.
> Ah, but there's also a limit to how many developer-hours you're willing
> to buy as well, so you've chosen to use Ruby rather than C. :) Of
> course, C is pretty much as fast as it's going to get, but the Ruby
> run-time is probably "laden with low-hanging fruit".

<<<<<
You've made several interesting points here in just two sentences. Part of
my business is building appliances, and another part is running them in
farms. I'm getting really aware of the marginal costs of production
computing. Pure machine cycles are still getting cheaper (not nearly as fast
as they once did) but the ancillary costs of running a cycle are NOT getting
cheaper. This is starting to have an effect on the standard calculus and
it's no longer unambiguously true that "iron is cheaper than programmers."
That's a big discussion on its own, but then you go on to make your point
about the Ruby runtime. I've expressed the intuition (it's nothing more than
that) that re-basing Ruby on a VM will not solve much of the real-world
performance problems we experience with Ruby. If I'm right and you're right,
then we all may indeed be missing some opportunities just by looking in the
wrong place.



> Developing "a large amount of code?" Why is there so much code required?
> Are there a lot of detailed special cases that can't be made into data?

<<<<<
No, I just meant the business needs for software are enormous and getting
larger every day. Every extra day it takes you to come to market (and I'm
talking about internal applications, not just commercial ones) is forgone
business value. We have so much software we need to write in my little
company that I'm obsessing over finding much better ways to do it. (I know
this is not a new problem. That doesn't mean it's not an urgent one.)



>
> Boy, you sure don't ask for much! :)

<<<
If you don't ask for much, you won't get it ;-)


Rinda/Linda: yes, but. I've been working with Linda spaces and actor spaces
for over ten years now. It's a high-level abstraction which is interesting
and powerful, but we need a few steps in between before it (or something
based on it, or inspired by it), can be used for large-scale development.

Your application: you've neatly described a split between things that belong
in Ruby and things (the raw matrix calculations) that belong in something
else. It's real nice that Ruby makes this easy to do.

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