Brian A. wrote:
is http://www.ruby-forum.com/. You can find a link to the Rails
- What’s your platform, and what version of Ruby are you running?
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i486-linux]
A couple of suggestions here:
-
Download the latest Ruby source – 1.8.6 pre something.
-
Compile it for your architecture – set CFLAGS = “-O2 -march=xxx”
where “xxx” is your architecture – it’s an AMD64 of some kind,
right?
If you’re running a 64-bit system, make sure you have a recent
64-bit kernel and GCC 4.1 – older compilers suck wet dog fur on the 64
bit machines.
That should get you somewhere in the 10 - 30 percent speed improvement
over a 486-compiled Ruby 1.8.4. It might be more, but just doing the
1.8.6 and the -O2 / march= stuff is pretty much mandatory.
$ uname -a
Linux airstream 2.6.17-11-generic #2 SMP Thu Feb 1 19:52:28 UTC 2007
i686 GNU/Linux
That should be OK – most likely it’s user time anyhow, not kernel time.
$ rails -v
Rails 1.2.1
I’m running Ubuntu 6.10
That should be fine too. The compiler is probably more important.
- Is it possible for you to abstract a subset of your application as
a benchmark, suitable for profiling?
Well, the “application” in this case is just a simple test for
benchmarking 
See my previous post for the Rails controller code
(what little there is of it).
Yeah, I saw that.
- Is it “simple enough” that it will “probably work” with the recent
jRuby implementation of Rails?
I would hope so - it doesn’t get much simpler.
I know Charles Oliver N. reads this list – he’s looking for tests
for the latest jRuby/Rails.
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
On 3/7/07, Jeremy K. [email protected] wrote:
I wrapped this up in a simple script that anyone with MySQL or SQLite
and the AR gem can run. It benchmarks AR create vs using the db
connection directly. See attached.
Excerpted results on a new MacBook Pro:
user system total real
raw quoted 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000 ( 0.480184)
create 2.760000 0.080000 2.840000 ( 3.225227)
(Nearly 7 times slower.) I haven’t tried profiling the methods yet.
An updated script that actually works with MySQL is attached 
Transactions make a huge difference with MySQL compared to the
negligible impact with in-memory SQLite.
user system total real
raw quoted 0.480000 0.120000 0.600000 ( 2.530020)
raw quoted txn 0.230000 0.060000 0.290000 ( 0.546332)
create 3.170000 0.320000 3.490000 ( 5.685493)
create txn 1.990000 0.090000 2.080000 ( 2.392676)
(2.2x slower without a transaction; 4.4x slower with)
jeremy
Jeremy K. wrote:
member.first_name = 'Fred'
end
updated_at datetime not null,
raw quoted 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000 ( 0.480184)
jeremy
Hi, are these results in production or development?
Talking about template rendering, I’m just wondering if anyone has
thought of pre-processing the template for a production environment.
For example, I’d imagine it’s might convenient to do things like ‘<%
tylesheet_tag %>’ etc when linking in files. But, each time Rails hits
one of those, it needs to render it. Would it make sense to have a
smart pre-processor that goes through the templates to see what
constants there are (like links to the same stylesheet, javascript
files, etc.) and even things like “form_start_tag”/ “form_end_tag” etc.
to pre-render it so that the number of times you need to create
something is reduced.
Has anyone benchmarked the time for rendering a page with many or few
such items?
It would be really interesting to have a tool that could pre-render such
things for production…
Cheers
Mohit.
On 3/8/07, Mohit S. [email protected] wrote:
Jeremy K. wrote:
Excerpted results on a new MacBook Pro:
user system total real
raw quoted 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000 ( 0.480184)
create 2.760000 0.080000 2.840000 ( 3.225227)
Hi, are these results in production or development?
There is no difference between the two in this case, so the script
doesn’t set RAILS_ENV at all.
Talking about template rendering, I’m just wondering if anyone has
thought of pre-processing the template for a production environment.
For example, I’d imagine it’s might convenient to do things like ‘<%
tylesheet_tag %>’ etc when linking in files. But, each time Rails hits
one of those, it needs to render it. Would it make sense to have a
smart pre-processor that goes through the templates to see what
constants there are (like links to the same stylesheet, javascript
files, etc.) and even things like “form_start_tag”/ “form_end_tag” etc.
to pre-render it so that the number of times you need to create
something is reduced.
Yes! See Stefan K.’ template optimizer:
http://railsexpress.de/plugins/trac
Has anyone benchmarked the time for rendering a page with many or few
such items?
Yes. See Stefan’s blog; he regularly benchmarks his apps against each
new Rails release. I think he’s covered the impact of the template
optimizer.
jeremy
Brian A. wrote:
Interesting. Do you mind if I ask where you got the 10 to 30% figure?
Stability is more important to me than raw speed, so I’d prefer to not
use anything newer than Ruby 1.8.5-p12.
I’m running a 32 bit kernel because 64 bit was, let’s say,
problematic. My gcc is 4.1.2.
http://www.jhaampe.org/software/ruby-gcc and
http://rubyforge.org/viewvc/MatrixBenchmark/?root=cougar
The 1.8.6 preview 3 is due for release this weekend, IIRC. I’m not sure
how one measures stability for a Ruby interpreter, but there are
definitely a few performance tweaks – my MatrixBenchmark picked up
about 10 or 11 percent on a Pentium III from the switch. (with -O2
-march=pentium3, of course.)
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
On 3/8/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
The 1.8.6 preview 3 is due for release this weekend, IIRC. I’m not sure
how one measures stability for a Ruby interpreter, but there are
definitely a few performance tweaks – my MatrixBenchmark picked up
about 10 or 11 percent on a Pentium III from the switch. (with -O2
-march=pentium3, of course.)
Preview 3 is out:
ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-preview3.tar.gz
I used it for the earlier benches and it has posed no problems for any
of my Rails apps in development.
Be sure to work with Rails’ 1-2-stable branch (or edge) for a
smattering of 1.8.6 compatibility fixes due out in the upcoming Rails
1.2.3.
jeremy
On 3/8/07, Jeremy K. [email protected] wrote:
I created a smaller test that I could post that exhibits the same
member.city = ‘Reykjavik’
Opteron. It pegged Mongrel and MySQL didn’t break a sweat.
me yet, and there is hope it can be sped up since it doesn’t appear to
address1 varchar(50) null,
In my experience with typical Rails apps, you’ll hit a wall with ERB
template rendering much sooner than with Active Record creation. This
is an interesting pursuit nonetheless – I’m interested to see what
you all come up with.
Best regards,
jeremy
Jeremy
Are there, or could there be, performance tests like this added to the
Rails test suite? It would be great to be able to track performance
like this over Rails releases.
Jeremy K. wrote:
Hi, are these results in production or development?
tylesheet_tag %>’ etc when linking in files. But, each time Rails hits
Has anyone benchmarked the time for rendering a page with many or few
such items?
Yes. See Stefan’s blog; he regularly benchmarks his apps against each
new Rails release. I think he’s covered the impact of the template
optimizer.
jeremy
Thanks! COOL!
That’s what I need to take a look at… you learn 7 new things on this
list every day 
Cheers
Mohit.
Hello Jeremy.
Are you saying that config/production.rb and config/development.rb
are identical?
–
– Tom M., CTO
– Engine Y., Ruby on Rails Hosting
– Reliability, Ease of Use, Scalability
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)
On 3/8/07, Jeremy K. [email protected] wrote:
On 3/8/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
The 1.8.6 preview 3 is due for release this weekend, IIRC. I’m not sure
how one measures stability for a Ruby interpreter, but there are
definitely a few performance tweaks – my MatrixBenchmark picked up
about 10 or 11 percent on a Pentium III from the switch. (with -O2
-march=pentium3, of course.)
Preview 3 is out:
ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-preview3.tar.gz
And it’s already in portage (I \heart Gentoo!)
martin
On 3/8/07, Tom M. [email protected] wrote:
Are you saying that config/production.rb and config/development.rb
are identical?
No, sorry: it doesn’t load a Rails environment at all, just vanilla
Active Record.
The Rails environment has no bearing on Active Record in isolation,
beyond choosing the default database connection:
$ grep -r RAILS_ENV lib/ |grep -v svn|wc -l
2
Your Rails app reloads application classes during development so some
AR caches, like the per-class table metadata, are wiped as a result.
jeremy
On 3/8/07, Rob S. [email protected] wrote:
Are there, or could there be, performance tests like this added to the
Rails test suite? It would be great to be able to track performance
like this over Rails releases.
Sure; I think so. But I don’t want to compile or maintain the suite
jeremy
On Mar 8, 2007, at 1:30 PM, Brian A. wrote:
Mohit, do you mind if I ask how you’re posting messages to
comp.lang.ruby?
I believe that was a cross-posted reply by Jeremy. I never saw the
message either.
James Edward G. II
Jeremy K. wrote:
On 3/8/07, Mohit S. [email protected] wrote:
Jeremy K. wrote:
Excerpted results on a new MacBook Pro:
user system total real
raw quoted 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000 ( 0.480184)
create 2.760000 0.080000 2.840000 ( 3.225227)
Hi, are these results in production or development?
Mohit, do you mind if I ask how you’re posting messages to
comp.lang.ruby? While reading Jeremy’s posts I realized I didn’t see
either of your posts via my newsreader. When I noticed the first time, I
thought my ISP might have just randomly dropped some posts, but when I
went to:
http://www.ruby-forum.com
I saw both of your posts, but neither showed up via my newsreader
(Thunderbird). That seemed too coincidental for a Bellsouth screw up, so
I thought I’d ask.
Thanks,
Brian
James Edward G. II wrote:
Hi, are these results in production or development?
Mohit, do you mind if I ask how you’re posting messages to
comp.lang.ruby?
I believe that was a cross-posted reply by Jeremy. I never saw the
message either.
James Edward G. II
Interesting. I guess I mistakenly assumed a one-to-one correspondence
between comp.lang.ruby and the “ruby” forum at
http://www.ruby-forum.com/ but now that I look more closely at the
latter, it does say “Gateway to the ruby-talk mailing list.”
Thanks for confusing me Jeremy 
James Edward G. II wrote:
create 2.760000 0.080000 2.840000 ( 3.225227)
between comp.lang.ruby and the “ruby” forum at
http://www.ruby-forum.com/ but now that I look more closely at the
latter, it does say “Gateway to the ruby-talk mailing list.”
I don’t believe ruby-forum is involved here. I think Jeremy
cross-posted from the Rails list.
James Edward G. II
Well if you go to: High ActiveRecord CPU Utilization - Ruby - Ruby-Forum
You’ll see this thread and you’ll see Mohit’s postings. As far as I can
tell, the above forum appears to be a superset of this comp.lang.ruby
thread. That’s why I thought some postings were dropped, but if you
didn’t see them either, I’ll stop worrying about it and continue on my
way
On Mar 8, 2007, at 1:50 PM, Brian A. wrote:
( 3.225227)
correspondence between comp.lang.ruby and the “ruby” forum at
http://www.ruby-forum.com/ but now that I look more closely at the
latter, it does say “Gateway to the ruby-talk mailing list.”
I don’t believe ruby-forum is involved here. I think Jeremy cross-
posted from the Rails list.
James Edward G. II
On Mar 8, 2007, at 3:10 PM, Brian A. wrote:
raw quoted 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000
James Edward G. II
You’ll see this thread and you’ll see Mohit’s postings. As far as I
can tell, the above forum appears to be a superset of this
comp.lang.ruby thread. That’s why I thought some postings were
dropped, but if you didn’t see them either, I’ll stop worrying
about it and continue on my way
Ah yes, I see it now. This is some quirk of ruby-forum I’m not
familiar with. Disregard my earlier posts. Sorry for spreading
confusion.
James Edward G. II
Jeremy K. wrote:
On 3/8/07, Rob S. [email protected] wrote:
Are there, or could there be, performance tests like this added to the
Rails test suite? It would be great to be able to track performance
like this over Rails releases.
Sure; I think so. But I don’t want to compile or maintain the suite
jeremy
I would think someone in the “core Rails team” would step up to the
plate for Rails-specific benchmarks. But if the specific case under
discussion here – ActiveRecord – turns out to have a bottleneck
somewhere in the Ruby interpreter, rather than just an inefficient
strategy in the ActiveRecord code itself, then I’d say this benchmark
belongs in a Ruby benchmark suite rather than a Rails benchmark suite.
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
On 3/8/07, Brian A. [email protected] wrote:
http://www.ruby-forum.com/ but now that I look more closely at the
latter, it does say “Gateway to the ruby-talk mailing list.”
Thanks for confusing me Jeremy
Ha! Sorry. I just hit “Reply All” to Mohit’s message. Blame GMail
jeremy