From: Chris Fisher <cfisher@...>
Date: 2002-12-10T01:50:25+09:00
Subject: eRuby and mod_ruby = *slow*?

Hi,

I'm new to Ruby.  I'm currently using PHP for web development; it works
alright, but I find myself struggling with it just to get simple tasks
done so I'm doing a quick evaluation of Ruby to see if it fits my needs.
I created a simple Ruby script and ran 'ab' against it, just to get a
basic idea of mod_ruby + eRuby performance:

ruby_test.rhtml
===============
<html>
 <body>
  <% puts 'test' %>
 </body>
</html>

Simple as can be.  Some highlights from the 'ab -n 100 -c 20' results:

    Time taken for tests:   11.856 seconds

    Requests per second:    8.43 [#/sec] (mean)
    Time per request:       2371.20 [ms] (mean)
    Time per request:       118.56 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent
requests)

    Connnection Times (ms)
                  min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
    Connect:        0   312  252.1    348   762
    Processing:   356  1800  985.7   1423  5148
    Waiting:      175  1766 1005.1   1385  5148
    Total:        356  2111  855.9   1865  5148

Obviously this is just a simple benchmark, by no means comprehensive; if
there's a better way of getting some ballpark figures on how Ruby
performs in this environment I'm all ears.  I'm not expecting stellar
figures on a Pro 200 either, but they're relative to what I'm getting
from PHP.

Anyway, those numbers are horrible.  There was a thread I spotted where
someone stated mod_ruby is usually 95% as fast as PHP -- definitely not
the case in my experience.  For example, a PHP script that iterates over
an array with 10 elements and prints out each element's value never
dropped below 135 requests/second in the same benchmark.

So what's going on here?  Why is it taking so long for eRuby to print
out a single line of text?  Is it possible I've misconfigured something?
I'm not sure what information might be useful, so let me know if there's
anything important I left out.  Suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Regards,
Chris