# Making Ruby faster with Judy

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-ruby-faster-with-judy/86949>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [February 27, 2007, 2:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-ruby-faster-with-judy/86949 "2007-02-27T02:32:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fmwr](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/9de053/32.png) [@fmwr](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fmwr)\
**Post date:** [February 27, 2007, 2:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-ruby-faster-with-judy/86949/1 "2007-02-27T02:32:42Z")

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I tried to optimize Ruby a bit more. The results vary quite a lot with  
benchmarks,  
but typical improvement is about 5% less time and 4% less memory.

More about it:

- [taw's blog: Ruby and Judy](http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2007/02/ruby-and-judy.html)  
And a patch against Ruby 1.8.2-p12:
- [http://zabor.org/taw/ruby-performance-patch-judy-2007-02-26.patch.gz](http://zabor.org/taw/ruby-performance-patch-judy-2007-02-26.patch.gz)

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**Author:** ![fmwr](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/9de053/32.png) [@fmwr](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fmwr)\
**Post date:** [February 27, 2007, 11:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-ruby-faster-with-judy/86949/2 "2007-02-27T11:19:25Z")

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On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 10:31:49AM +0900, Tomasz W. wrote:

> I tried to optimize Ruby a bit more. The results vary quite a lot with  
> benchmarks, but typical improvement is about 5% less time and 4% less  
> memory.
> 
> More about it:
> 
> - [taw's blog: Ruby and Judy](http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2007/02/ruby-and-judy.html)  
> And a patch against Ruby 1.8.2-p12:
> - [http://zabor.org/taw/ruby-performance-patch-judy-2007-02-26.patch.gz](http://zabor.org/taw/ruby-performance-patch-judy-2007-02-26.patch.gz)

I wrote a naïve patch to use Judy for ruby’s internal tables in 2002;  
unlike  
yours, it replaced all st\_tables IIRC, but some of the feedback from  
Judy’s  
author might still apply, see [48365].

matz took a look at Judy last year, see  
[http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/20060628.html](http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/20060628.html)  
He seemed pretty excited about it, but the license (LGPL) would make  
integration a bit cumbersome.

Normally, a patch like this should be tested in HEAD before it gets in  
the 1.8  
branch, but it’s knu’s call, of course.

PS. please don’t include all of configure when just configure.in will  
do 😉