From: Su Zhang <su.comp.lang.ruby@...>
Date: 2012-02-03T11:40:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Basic Ruby performance

On 2/2/2012 9:14 PM, Dmitry Nikiforov wrote:
> My main area of development is processing of rather large amounts of
> data (billions of entries, primarily processed by regular expressions,
> with some statistical analysis on top, and potentially - addition of NLP
> later). You _have_ to iterate through every entry of the incoming data
> (which might already be in the database, plain text file, or might be
> just a "fire hose" of data pouring into the system in real time).
>
> While I'd LOVE to have a nice and clean syntax, performance is still
> number 1 on my list of priorities, therefore I asked if maybe there are
> ways to improve Ruby performance.
>

One thing you can do is to replace for loops with while loops. For loops 
in Ruby will be translated to method calls to Enumerable#each, and in 
Ruby 1.9, Enumerable#each is slower than using ordinary while loops 
because of the overhead of processing enumerators. It is actually even 
slower than Ruby 1.8's Enumerable#each because 1.8 does not have 
enumerators.