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How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

engineering.shopify.com

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Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#11

Post by FanaHOVA »

stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

> Is it "slow" enough to matter? Probably not until you get to a medium scale.

Phew, I'm glad GitHub and Shopify's scale is still small.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#12

Post by mindfulmore »

stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

The article doesn't even discuss benchmarking Ruby against other languages, so I'm not really sure what you're on about. Couldn't resist taking a performance jab at Rails?

Also, I'll take "double the hardware specs" if it means I'm actually able to focus on what I'm building and not dicking around with devops or rebuilding all of stuff Rails metaprograms for me by hand.

If there was a framework for being as productive as Rails at half the cost then it would be flourishing. There isn't and as a result Rails isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#13

Post by ryansouza »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #11
stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

> Is it "slow" enough to matter? Probably not until you get to a medium scale. Phew, I'm glad GitHub and Shopify's scale is still small.

I guarantee the tradeoffs matter to them

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#14

Post by todotask »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #11
stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

> Is it "slow" enough to matter? Probably not until you get to a medium scale. Phew, I'm glad GitHub and Shopify's scale is still small.

I recall Shopify hired a dev who works on a project, FaastRuby, written in Crystal language for their web app.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#15

Post by alberth »

What's current state on GraalVM as it relates to running production Ruby code?

From what I understand, it's the fastest VM out there at the moment for Ruby.

And yes, it's from Oracle but they have GPL'd the code [2]

[1] https://www.graalvm.org

[2] https://www.graalvm.org/docs/faq/

Edit: looks like TruffleRuby is built onto of Graal.

https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#16

Post by sosodev »

ryansouza wrote: post #13
FanaHOVA wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it "slow" enough to matter? Probably not until you get to a medium scale. Phew, I'm glad GitHub and Shopify's scale is still small.

I guarantee the tradeoffs matter to them

I’ve seen videos on Twitter of the Shopify CEO saying that Ruby’s performance literally doesn’t matter to them. That it’s easy enough to scale it horizontally and the benefits outweigh the cost.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#17

Post by dijit »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #11
stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

> Is it "slow" enough to matter? Probably not until you get to a medium scale. Phew, I'm glad GitHub and Shopify's scale is still small.

Pedantry aside, we've reached a point in our industry where we can do a lot with horizontal scalability.

I mean, every programmer who funnels through university understands map reduce, and that helps on multi-core threading up to system job running.

But there is a limit, usually in the persistence and caching layers. What you'll find is that those "large scale deployments" are going to have a -lot- of internal cache systems and I can pretty much guarantee that the services running those caches and persistence will not be written in ruby.

You can make anything* scale, but how many CPU cycles you need to burn to get the functionality you want is a matter for the finance department.

If you're running in a lossy business, you can bet that those CPU cycles will begin to cost more than developer velocity is worth, because servers are an eternal and ongoing cost.

On the flip side if you make more money than the infra+devs cost, then nobody is going to hound you for wasting 2x 3x the cost. Because "it's the cost of doing business" is easier to justify when you're cash positive.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#18

Post by llamataboot »

I even have a little method in my .pryrc that lets me easily benchmark on the fly in the console

def benchmark_time(repetitions = 100, &block) require 'benchmark' Benchmark.bm{ |b| b.report{ repetitions.times(&block) } } end

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#20

Post by [deleted] »

mindfulmore wrote: post #12
stevebmark wrote: post #7

Benchmarks are subjective, but all benchmarks show Ruby as slower than compared dynamic languages. The relative speed difference is different per benchmark, but across the board Ruby is slower. It fundamentally has to be slower. Ruby is the most dynamic of the dynamic programming languages. And the community has embraced metaprogramming, making it every more dynamic. Especially on webservers, you'll be executing hund…

The article doesn't even discuss benchmarking Ruby against other languages, so I'm not really sure what you're on about. Couldn't resist taking a performance jab at Rails? Also, I'll take "double the hardware specs" if it means I'm actually able to focus on what I'm building and not dicking around with devops or rebuilding all of stuff Rails metaprograms for me by hand. If there was a framework for being as productiv…

[deleted]
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