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Why Is JRuby Slow?

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Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#11

Post by jaredcwhite »

cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Ruby's basically as fast as Node.js. If you look at comparative benchmarks, Roda/Rack/Puma is within spitting distance of Koa, Fastify, etc. Express is actually slower in some benchmarks.

I don't think a lot of people are aware of just how much faster the Ruby ecosystem has gotten in the past few years (especially when you leave Rails out of the equation which is known not to do well in microbenchmarks).

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#12

Post by jshen »

tmp231 wrote: post #5

I remember about 10 years ago the promise was that JRuby was going to let ruby be basically as fast as Java for many things. Invokedynamic and all that.

It can be with work. This is basically true of all languages. I remember telling my team that I wanted them to use Java instead of python for some new service we were building because I wanted it to scale better. They were not happy about it, and they coded up two versions, one in python and one in Java. I was shocked by the results, they performed roughly equally in terms of latency and scaling. When I dug into it, the very abstract Java library that gave them the power of python ran about as fast as python. They could get rid of that library which made them far more productive, but then the project took longer and cost more.

In fairness, the Java version had an easier path for optimization, but there are no free lunches.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#13

Post by nijave »

Seems like there's obviously a big I/O performance difference. Maybe it's something simple like buffering being setup differently or not at all or sync vs async. It'd be interesting to dig in more

Even something like mmap can drastically improve performance since it lets the kernel handle I/O asynchronously from your program execution (so your code doesn't block as much or as easily on I/O)

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#15

Post by djur »

cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Crystal isn't the "only option" for fast Ruby because it's not Ruby. If Crystal is an option, so are a lot of languages.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#16

Post by nine_k »

zizee wrote: post #9
cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Could you not make the same argument about JavaScript? JavaScript was pretty slow for many years. Google then put some significant engineering investment into the V8 engine, resulting in a huge increase in JavaScript's performance.

Of course the answer is positive.

But it will take a drastic / complete rewrite of the VM, as it happened to Chrome's and Firefox's JavaScript VMs.

This means many man-years, and a certain break in the continuity, maybe with small but noticeable deviation in the VM's behavior. If we squint just so, we can consider Ruby 3.0 to be such a rewrite.

Crystal is a similar rewrite effort, but a one that isn't trying to stay backwards-compatible.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#17

Post by nine_k »

canadianfella wrote: post #8
cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

> Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat? Because Lua (1993) and JavaScript (1995) can be very fast.

To be just, Lua is drastically simpler as a language. A simpler language likely takes less effort to write an efficient JIT for its VM.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#18

Post by oefrha »

zizee wrote: post #9
cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Could you not make the same argument about JavaScript? JavaScript was pretty slow for many years. Google then put some significant engineering investment into the V8 engine, resulting in a huge increase in JavaScript's performance.

I think JavaScript performance received very significant investments from the biggest players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) thanks largely to the fact that you can’t throw more compute at it — JavaScript has to run on crappy user devices developers can’t upgrade. Ruby (or Python) never received anywhere near the JavaScript level of investment in performance. Of course there are fundamental design limitations too.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#19

Post by joelbluminator »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #11
cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Ruby's basically as fast as Node.js. If you look at comparative benchmarks, Roda/Rack/Puma is within spitting distance of Koa, Fastify, etc. Express is actually slower in some benchmarks. I don't think a lot of people are aware of just how much faster the Ruby ecosystem has gotten in the past few years (especially when you leave Rails out of the equation which is known not to do well in microbenchmarks).

I just heard Matz saying yesterday additional effort will be made to make Ruby run faster specifically on benchmarks. He said while they don't always correlate completely to real world performance, since developers seem to care a lot about benchmarks he wants Ruby devs to feel good about themselves and score well on these.

Re: Why Is JRuby Slow?

#20

Post by dehrmann »

zizee wrote: post #9
cutler wrote: post #6

If you want fast Ruby it seems Crystal is your only option. Ruby is an interpreted language released in 1996 for scripting. Why are we surprised when attempts to shoe-horn it into something else (Ruby 3.0, JRuby, Truffle Ruby) fall flat?

Could you not make the same argument about JavaScript? JavaScript was pretty slow for many years. Google then put some significant engineering investment into the V8 engine, resulting in a huge increase in JavaScript's performance.

There's significantly more motivation to run JS faster since JS isn't a choice; if you need an interactive website, it will use JS. Ruby is a choice.
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