From: Darrin Thompson <dthompson@...>
Date: 2001-11-03T01:05:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24170] Performance of Marshal.dump

In a program of mine using Marshal.dump I dumped an: Array of objects 
which had references to other objects. There were more than 6000 objects 
in the array, each of those referred to 5 more objects. Wow, now that I 
think about it, 36K+ objects in one dump. Woof. I was surprised though, 
that the operation of dumping this array took a few _minutes_. Even for 
that many objects, that seems like a really long time. Also, after one 
dump I read the objects back 10 times and seem to get sub-second 
response times.

Also, I've got unit tests and identified the performance bottleneck with 
a line profiler, so I'm pretty sure I've pinned down the problem correctly.

Here's the offending line of my program:

        value=Marshal.dump array

And the corresponding read that seems to take no time at all:

            return Marshal.load value

I'm stumped.

Darrin