From: Brian Adkins <lojicdotcomNOSPAM@...>
Date: 2007-03-07T12:35:08+09:00
Subject: High ActiveRecord CPU Utilization

When running a test that primarily involves loading up a few MySQL 
tables with ActiveRecord objects, I was surprised to see the Ruby CPU 
utilization at 93% and the MySQL CPU utilization at 7%. I would expect 
this workload to be heavier on MySQL than that.

I would think inserts (particularly with updating several foreign key 
indices) would tax the database more than Ruby.

Has this been other folks' experience? Is running in the test 
environment incredibly different than production with respect to CPU 
utilization? I suppose my next step is to run in production to see what 
kind of results I get.

I'm running the test from the root of my Rails project via:

ruby test/unit/foo.rb

Here's part of the profiler output:

  %
time name
7.96 ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Quoting.quote
5.61 ActiveRecord::Base#read_attribute
5.15 ActiveRecord::Base#column_for_attribute
4.25 ActiveRecord::Base#connection
3.74 Hash#[]
3.58 Array#each
3.30 ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::MysqlAdapter#quote
3.16 ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column#type_cast
2.84 Module#===
2.65 ActiveRecord::Base#clone_attribute_value
2.29 ActiveRecord::Base#write_attribute
2.24 Kernel.class
2.22 Hash#each
2.08 String#to_s
2.03 ActiveRecord::Base#quote_value
1.59 Kernel.send
1.55 Array#include?
1.52 Kernel.==
1.48 ActiveRecord::Base#unserializable_attribute?
1.39 Class#read_inheritable_attribute
1.34 Kernel.clone
1.29 ActiveRecord::Callbacks.notify
1.15 ActiveRecord::Base#method_missing
1.08 ActiveRecord::Base#columns_hash
1.08 ActiveRecord::Base#respond_to?
1.08 ActiveRecord::Callbacks.callback
0.99 Kernel.eval
0.95 Symbol#===
0.90 Observable.notify_observers
0.88 ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column#text?
0.85 Hash#[]=
0.85 Class#inheritable_attributes
0.83 Kernel.kind_of?
0.81 ActiveRecord::Base#convert_number_column_value
...