From: Milan Maksimovic Date: 2002-12-15T03:07:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby slow?? From: "Garriss, Michael" > Found this site about how languages stack up against each other. This test > put Ruby far behind to others. Has this changed with 1.7? What's the deal > with these results? My experience is that Ruby speed very, very much depends on the build you're using. I'm talking about Ruby on Windows, PragProg builds (as somebody here once said - "yes, I'm a lazy bum that doesn't build his own Ruby"). I occasionally run stuff on Linux but I never measured many different versions there, so I can't say how much speed depends on that). Back to Ruby on Windows, - cygwin 1.6.x builds were extremely fast, far faster then Python (up to 20 (yes, twenty) times on some of my real world samples), and 4 to 5 times faster then equivalent Perl scriops, where both Perl and Python were latest ActiveState builds at the time (about a year and a half ago), and programs were structurally identical. Then came the sad period of native (non-cygwin) Win32 1.6.x builds, and those were much, much slower then cygwin (about 6 to 8 times on my tests, but never as slow as Python). Then came 1.7.x native builds where the never-buffered-read bug was fixed, which brought 1.7.x builds to be only twice slower then 1.6.x cygwin builds. Tests included massive directory traversals, file reading and regexing. For this reason I always keep at least two versions of Ruby installed - cygwin 1.6.5 for stuff where speed matters (i.e. there's lots of big file reading and parsing going on), and latest 1.7.3 for stuff where speed doesn't mean much. Regards, M. PS Please don't flame me for figures (20x, 4x, etc.) mentioned in this post. I am fully aware that those figures only relate to my limited samples and in no way present actual general (whatever that would mean) performance rates between mentioned languages. Etc. etc. etc.