From: Steven Lumos <slumos@...>
Date: 2003-12-12T05:17:00+09:00
Subject: Re: [Q] Fast loading of BIG data structures


"T. Onoma" <transami@runbox.com> writes:
> On Thursday 11 December 2003 02:27 am, Steven Lumos wrote:
> > 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
> 
> Curious. What kind of machine are you running this on? These times seem a bit
> slow in general.

That was on a Blade 2000, but the timing for the require case is
basically the same on an Athlon 1600 running Windows 2000.

> I'm also wondering how Yaml would compare. Are you running ruby 1.8+? If so 
> try using to_yaml and dumping the result to a file, and then reload. Simple 
> example to help if you're not familiar with Yaml:

I love Yaml, but I didn't try it because it's already documented as
being slower than Marshal.

Steve