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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

#31

Post by chrisseaton »

yxhuvud wrote: post #27
alberth wrote: post #15

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

Last time I tried to run Truffle on the company test suite it spent an hour processing 1/8th of the suite. Then it was killed by the OOM killer. On a 32 GB machine. To be fair there was only one or two errors during that, so compatibility is at least getting there. Meanwhile Ruby 2.6.5 chugs along and finishes the whole suite in 8 minutes. Never hitting any unreasonable amounts of memory.

Yes TruffleRuby struggles to run test code because it works against the optimisations we add to make production code fast. For example when you add more profiling to better optimise the hot code it makes the cold code slower, and tests are almost all cold code.

Also our C extension emulation layer used to be extraordinarily slow while we made it work correctly, and it's still rather slow.

It's a challenge but we're working on it.

But TruffleRuby is the only alternative Ruby implementation to even run major applications that I've tried at Shopify.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#32

Post by wolco »

meesterdude wrote: post #21
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…

Stop painting ruby as slow. In benchmarks i've seen it's handily beat out PHP, which still runs much of the web. the ruby 3x3 goal, of getting running super mario at 60FPS, was if i recall correctly, already reached (or close to it) in ruby 2.6. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/03/22/ruby-3x3-perfo... additionally: > Sinatra + Sequel is already very competitive in web performance with Go > Between Ruby 1.8 and…

Ruby is slower than php.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#33

Post by throwawaylabor »

dijit wrote: post #17
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.

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…

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

I wish this were true. There is a high degree of variability between skillsets from different American universities, even in my state of Washington.

Other than that, I agree whole heartedly.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#34

Post by meesterdude »

wolco wrote: post #32
meesterdude wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop painting ruby as slow. In benchmarks i've seen it's handily beat out PHP, which still runs much of the web. the ruby 3x3 goal, of getting running super mario at 60FPS, was if i recall correctly, already reached (or close to it) in ruby 2.6. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/03/22/ruby-3x3-perfo... additionally: > Sinatra + Sequel is already very competitive in web performance with Go > Between Ruby 1.8 and…

Ruby is slower than php. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I've seen conflicting benchmarks on this showing different results - possibly has changed over time, or run different comparisons. What you linked seems current at least.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#35

Post by pvsukale3 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #31
yxhuvud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried to run Truffle on the company test suite it spent an hour processing 1/8th of the suite. Then it was killed by the OOM killer. On a 32 GB machine. To be fair there was only one or two errors during that, so compatibility is at least getting there. Meanwhile Ruby 2.6.5 chugs along and finishes the whole suite in 8 minutes. Never hitting any unreasonable amounts of memory.

Yes TruffleRuby struggles to run test code because it works against the optimisations we add to make production code fast. For example when you add more profiling to better optimise the hot code it makes the cold code slower, and tests are almost all cold code. Also our C extension emulation layer used to be extraordinarily slow while we made it work correctly, and it's still rather slow. It's a challenge but we're w…

Unrelated: But thank you for the work you and your team are doing. I wish you all the success.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#36

Post by Thaxll »

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.

Shopify is actually replacing slow ruby code with Go. And yes they ACK that Ruby is too slow. Also Shopify is a big monolith so it does not help.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#37

Post by cygx »

meesterdude wrote: post #34
wolco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby is slower than php. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I've seen conflicting benchmarks on this showing different results - possibly has changed over time, or run different comparisons. What you linked seems current at least.

Also keep in mind that as far as performance of dynamic languages goes, all of the P* languages (Perl, Python, PHP, and... Ruby ;)) have been left in the dust by the front-runners (eg Node.js or LuaJIT). Perl used to be king a long time ago, eventually, PHP took pole position, and maybe now it's Ruby's time to shine. But being leader of that particular pack could mean you're nevertheless still 'slow' depending on context.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#38

Post by ch4s3 »

kipply wrote: post #22
ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TruffleRuby can’t quite run Rails yet. They use truffle for some plain Ruby stuff.

Not running most Rails applications is true, but the applications that can be run on TruffleRuby are not quite plain. It can run a web application that serves storefront traffic (source at the end of https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing... )

Yeah, of course I was generalizing a bit. That blog post is super informative, thanks!

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#39

Post by ch4s3 »

Thaxll wrote: post #36
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.

Shopify is actually replacing slow ruby code with Go. And yes they ACK that Ruby is too slow. Also Shopify is a big monolith so it does not help.

A monolith doesn't necessarily mean slower, even with Ruby. There are lots of opportunities to run less code on each request, do some work with the db, and to split off measure bottlenecks into services in a faster language. It's often good to build things quickly, find fit, and then carefully measure before you introduce calls over the network.

Re: How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

#40

Post by alberth »

chrisseaton wrote: post #31
yxhuvud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried to run Truffle on the company test suite it spent an hour processing 1/8th of the suite. Then it was killed by the OOM killer. On a 32 GB machine. To be fair there was only one or two errors during that, so compatibility is at least getting there. Meanwhile Ruby 2.6.5 chugs along and finishes the whole suite in 8 minutes. Never hitting any unreasonable amounts of memory.

Yes TruffleRuby struggles to run test code because it works against the optimisations we add to make production code fast. For example when you add more profiling to better optimise the hot code it makes the cold code slower, and tests are almost all cold code. Also our C extension emulation layer used to be extraordinarily slow while we made it work correctly, and it's still rather slow. It's a challenge but we're w…

Amazing work and really appreciate all you're doing to better the ecosystem.

Question: (a) do you believe we'll ever get to a day when TruffleRuby/Graal will be able to 100% run Ruby on Rails and (b) how much faster over MRI do you believe it could achieve?

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