From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2003-03-19T02:07:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal (was Re: Protocols)

Hi Shannon,

From: "Xiangrong Fang" <xrfang@hotmail.com>
> I think ruby's is ok for me, however, I
> don'see very good performance in 1.6.7's Marshal, so I continue to use
> sysread and split to build my hash in memory.

I'm getting pretty good speed in Win32 1.6.6 Ruby using Marshal to
decode a string loaded with sysread, ala:
  
  def load(filename)
    dat = File.open(filename, "r") {|f| f.binmode; f.sysread(f.stat.size) }
    @entries = Marshal.load(dat)
  end

It loads a million-entry hash table (18 meg on disk) in about
15 sec. on my system.  (Goes a couple seconds faster if surrounded
with GC.disable/GC.enable, as you mentioned in an earlier post.)

[A 100000-entry version of the hash table, 1.8 meg on disk, as
anticipated, took about 1.5 seconds to load.]


Hope this helps,

Bill