From: Lionel Bouton <lionel-subscription@...>
Date: 2007-10-28T03:34:47+09:00
Subject: Re: How fast does your Ruby run?

Daniel Sch�mer wrote:
> Gentoo Linux on Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (512 KB cache):
>
> Ruby  Patch Platform            Seconds   Iterations per second
> ===== ===== =================== ========= =====================
> 1.8.6   111 i686-linux (gentoo) 32.801483  30486
> 1.8.6  5000 i686-linux          13.607635  73488
> 1.9.0     0 i686-linux           3.988949 250692
> 1.8.5  3876 java                63.589     15725
> 1.8.5  3876 java (-J-server)    44.173     22638
> 1.8.5  3876 java (-O)           36.917     27087
> 1.8.5  3876 java (-O -J-server) 15.194     65815
>
> The first is the system installed ruby.

IIRC on my Gentoo I got +80% on this particular benchmark with
USE="-threads". Given this huge difference I looked at the speedup for
the test suite of one of my Rails applications and got only ~ +10%.

That said I use Xpath in one Ruby script and the speedup was
unbelievable : maybe +1000% (yes 3 zeros, the script took more than a
minute, maybe several and with USE="-threads" it went through the data
in less than ten seconds).
I believe Ruby compiled with pthread is known to have performance
problems (at least on Linux as I've seen reports of such behavior on
Linux before)...

If you want speed on Linux (and maybe other flavours of Unix), you
should look at compiling it without pthread. Warning: as some classes
may use system libs that *are* compiled with pthread, you might not have
this choice (IIRC the pthread support is there just to support such
libraries).

If someone knows more about this subject (and how to tell if compiling
without pthread is safe), I'd love to know the details.

Regards,

Lionel