Ruby Strikes Back
0
If you haven't been following Mauricio Fernandez's blog, then please do yourself a favor and subscribe to it; Mauricio's writings are very interesting and informative. In one of his posts, Mauricio gives a record of re-implementing his blog in OCaml using the OCsigen (webserver + framework) library.
Mauricio did some benchmarking for the OCsigen environment against Rails and even a C fastcgi implementation. Naturally, one would expect that OCaml will be orders of magnitude faster than Ruby. But the benchmark showed really abysmal performance for Rail vs. OCsigen. We are talking 260 request per second vs. 4500 requests per second for a single process test! That's more than 15X difference! I decided that Ruby can do better.
I had a look at what OCsigen offers and decided that Rails is an overkill in comparison. I thought that for Ruby a nice alternative can be the mystery webserver + framework called unicycle (never heard of it? you don't know what you're missing if you haven't). Since OCsigen offers LWt (a light weight cooperative threading library) at its core for concurrency, I added a fiber wrapper to Unicycle's request processing path so that we get a similar overhead (I was testing under Ruby 1.9.1).
I didn't recreate the whole set of benchmarks; I only benchmarked the new configuration on my machine.
Here are my results:
Hello World - Unicycle, Single Process: 7378 requests/second
Please note that I am running this on my Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHZ processor vs. the 3GHZ desktop AMD Athlon64 that was used for the original tests (it should be roughly 50% faster than my mobile core2).
I decided to take it further still. Mauricio mentioned that he was able to get performance above 2000 req/s from OCsigen when benchmarking the blog page that we are discussing here. So I created a sqlite database (he mentioned somewhere that he is using sqlite) and I inserted the same blog entry (with very little modifications) in a structured manner. I didn't bother with comments though (out of being lazy). I used Sequel to connect and fetch the record from the database and an rhtml template that is rendered using Erubis. The result was a page very similar to the original blog post.
I used ab to benchmark the page.
Unicyle + Fibers + Sequel (Sqlite) + Erubis, Single Process: 1296 requests/second
During the time of testing, the Unicycle process was between 13MB and 21MB (that's 3x to 4x the size of the OCsigen process)
Considering that the components found in any laptop are usually inferior to their desktop counter parts, I believe this at least equals the figure reported for OCsigen's performance.
How can Ruby achieve such performance? By careful selection of components:
- First off, there is Ruby 1.9.1. Everybody should start using it for their next project; it is much faster and much easier on memory.
- Unicycle is built atop EventMachine and the EventMachine HTTP Server; both are C based speed demons. Unicycle itself is a minimal framework that doesn't attempt to be so smart.
- Erubis is a nice surprise. Pure Ruby and decent speed are not commonly found together, but kudos to the authors of Erubis; they somehow did it.
Conclusion
Ruby is faster than OCaml. Wrong! OCaml is a lot faster than Ruby. But thanks to the hard work done by some prominent Rubyists, you can have a Ruby setup that performs decently enough to make you proud.
Written By:
Muhammad A. Ali (oldmoe.blogspot.com)
Post a Comment
eSpace podcast Prodcast
Archive
Latest Comments
- SpectraMind Commented on Egypt Wins UK's National Outsourcing Association Award
- Rofaida Awad Commented on Go Egypt Go!
- Different Mike Commented on Only idiots change their iPhone root password!
- Mike Commented on Only idiots change their iPhone root password!
- smile Commented on Only idiots change their iPhone root password!
