Ruby Performance

Question

I'm pretty keen to develop my first Ruby app, as my company has finally blessed its use internally.

In everything I've read about Ruby up to v1.8, there is never anything positive said about performance, but I've found nothing about version 1.9. The last figures I saw about 1.8 had it drastically slower than just about everything out there, so I'm hoping this was addressed in 1.9.

Has performance drastically improved? Are there some concrete things that can be done with Ruby apps (or things to avoid) to keep performance at the best possible level?

Answer 1

There are some benchmarks of 1.8 vs 1.9 at http://www.rubychan.de/share/yarv_speedups.html. Overall, it looks like 1.9 is a lot faster in most cases.

Answer 2

If scalability and performance are really important to you you can also check out Ruby Enterprise Edition. It's a custom implementation of the Ruby interpreter that's supposed to be much better about memory allocation and garbage collection. I haven't seen any objective metrics comparing it directly to JRuby, but all of the anectdotal evidence I've heard has been very very good.

This is from the same company that created Passenger (aka mod_rails) which you should definitely check out as a rails deployment solution if you decide not to go the JRuby route.