From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2003-12-11T11:02:19+09:00
Subject: Re: [Q] Fast loading of BIG data structures

Hi,

From: "Steven Lumos" <slumos@yahoo.com>
[...]
> My question is: Is there an even faster way to load a big structure
> than this?
> 
> My first thought was to use Marshal, but I was surprised to find that
> Marshal.load takes about twice as long as require:
> 
>   $ ruby -v
>   ruby 1.8.0 (2003-08-04) [sparc-solaris2.8]
>   $ time ruby -e "require 'network'"
>   real    0m3.431s
>   user    0m3.080s
>   sys     0m0.200s
>   $ time ruby -e "File.open('network.dump') {|f| Marshal.load(f)}"
>   real    0m7.321s
>   user    0m6.880s
>   sys     0m0.170s


On the off-chance it's something about the way Marshal is doing
file IO (I've had it be slow under Windows), you might try for
comparison:

bin = File.open('network.dump', "rb") {|f| f.sysread(f.stat.size) }
dat = Marshal.load(bin)

...just in case it might be faster...  (On Windows, with Ruby 1.6.8,
this made a considerable difference...)


HTH,

Bill