3 ms·

Those Sinatra numbers look a lot better than I remember them being! But I wouldn't give that much credence to that, there's barely anything happening in those

Those Sinatra numbers look a lot better than I remember them being! But I wouldn't give that much credence to that, there's barely anything happening in those benchmarks and it seems to be testing things that have had a lot of optimization effort thrown at them. Try adding session management, user permissions, large data models, some business logic, all without putting a lot of effort into optimizing (ie like most work environments) and try again. Also, yeah, use some heavy (extremely popular) gems like ActiveRecord. And God forbid you actually do something computationally intensive anywhere. Serialization (even with drivers written in C) is also very slow if you have a lot of data. And if you have enough traffic, even a 2x performance difference can be pretty important in terms of cost. AR and similar libraries are the killer of performance in the Ruby eco-system. It's not the bare web framework itself, but the entire eco-system is generally not too worried about performance compared to other languages (partially because it's harder to optimize in Ruby, partially due to the culture). That said, the language has gotten a lot faster since the 1.8 days, eg GC has seen a lot of improvement, but it's still damn slow.

jashmatthews 9y ago
Until recently none of the Ruby setups in the TechEmpower benchmark were configured even vaguely correctly. Previously they were comparing Sinatra running on 8 cores to Go running on 40 cores. At my day job have an a prod analytics service with all the stuff you mention written in Rust + PG, and the Rust bit which handles data ingestion via HTTP and JSON is only about 5x faster than the equivalent Ruby code. Obviously, that was a big disappoitment to me. Serialization performance in the default Rails setup is horrific but calling Oj explicitly on an ActiveModelSerializer instead of the Rails "render :json, @model" brings it much closer to "fast" languages than you'd expect, improving performance about 74x. I wish I was joking. If the perf difference simply means buying 2x the servers then as a company you have to be pretty big before it's worth throwing out the entire Ruby/Rails ecosystem and getting stuck with far less mature libraries in newer, less widely used languages like Go or Rust. There are tons of major sites using Ruby/Python for their web layer. Instagram, Stripe, Airbnb, Shopify, HotelTonight, GitHub, and even part of Netflix is powered by Rails. If you look at the work Aaron Patterson and Shaun Griffin have done and are doing on AR, or what Peter Ohler has done with Oj, I don't think it's fair to say that either the Rails or Ruby ecosystem doesn't care about performance. They just don't put it before usability by default. Compared to other scripting languages, even performance focused ones like Lua, Ruby's performance is very good, and will only continue to improve with MJIT coming to MRI Ruby, and an entire new high performance alternative implementation coming with TruffleRuby.
- ehsanu1 9y ago
  At my day job have an a prod analytics service with all the stuff you mention written in Rust + PG, and the Rust bit which handles data ingestion via HTTP and JSON is only about 5x faster than the equivalent Ruby code. Obviously, that was a big disappoitment to me. 5x isn't too shabby for something potentially somewhat IO-bound. Presumably the effort wasn't 5x to build and maintain that, so if that's a very hot inner loop of something that's great. What I've found is that using Ruby (mainly gems) idiomatically can just lead to way slower performance. Eg I use time libraries a lot for my day job, and the idiomatic way to write the code had tons of hidden costs and was basically impossible to optimize. So I wrote a ruby extension in rust, and got a 30x speedup on that code - it was pretty computationally intensive, so a perfect fit for this. Part of it was that I was forced to use more primitive types, but in Rust-land I was able to add types all over the primitives and abstract away to my heart's content, without any overhead. That's just something that's impossible in Ruby - each abstraction always has a cost and there's no way around it. If you look at the work Aaron Patterson and Shaun Griffin have done and are doing on AR, or what Peter Ohler has done with Oj, I don't think it's fair to say that either the Rails or Ruby ecosystem doesn't care about performance. They just don't put it before usability by default. Right I wouldn't say nobody cares about performance, some people care a lot and they've been doing great work and helping raise the bar. But overall, the bar is pretty low in the Ruby world. Chris Seaton (one of TruffleRuby's main authors) has a talk where he shows some of the batshit insane code you see in gems, which they had to figure out how to optimize in TruffleRuby/Graal. Code like allocating a new array and calling the `min` method in order to find the smaller of two values! And that was being called in a hot inner loop! In a gem with otherwise great functionality, a nice website and thousands of users. That's the kind of thing you only see in Ruby-land. Also, using method_missing (gotta have that pretty DSL, performance and greppability/discoverability be damned) and monkey-patching/alias-chaining/etc is still common unfortunately (though a smart JIT, ie Graal, can apparently handle that). I am really excited about TruffleRuby and it does really amazing things to optimize crazy Ruby code, so I'm looking forward to Ruby being as fast as say JS in the future. Can't wait for the day I can turn on TruffleRuby in production and halve the AWS bill.
  - jashmatthews 9y ago

jashmatthews 9y ago

Until recently none of the Ruby setups in the TechEmpower benchmark were configured even vaguely correctly. Previously they were comparing Sinatra running on 8 cores to Go running on 40 cores. At my day job have an a prod analytics service with all the stuff you mention written in Rust + PG, and the Rust bit which handles data ingestion via HTTP and JSON is only about 5x faster than the equivalent Ruby code. Obviously, that was a big disappoitment to me. Serialization performance in the default Rails setup is horrific but calling Oj explicitly on an ActiveModelSerializer instead of the Rails "render :json, @model" brings it much closer to "fast" languages than you'd expect, improving performance about 74x. I wish I was joking. If the perf difference simply means buying 2x the servers then as a company you have to be pretty big before it's worth throwing out the entire Ruby/Rails ecosystem and getting stuck with far less mature libraries in newer, less widely used languages like Go or Rust. There are tons of major sites using Ruby/Python for their web layer. Instagram, Stripe, Airbnb, Shopify, HotelTonight, GitHub, and even part of Netflix is powered by Rails. If you look at the work Aaron Patterson and Shaun Griffin have done and are doing on AR, or what Peter Ohler has done with Oj, I don't think it's fair to say that either the Rails or Ruby ecosystem doesn't care about performance. They just don't put it before usability by default. Compared to other scripting languages, even performance focused ones like Lua, Ruby's performance is very good, and will only continue to improve with MJIT coming to MRI Ruby, and an entire new high performance alternative implementation coming with TruffleRuby.

ehsanu1 9y ago
At my day job have an a prod analytics service with all the stuff you mention written in Rust + PG, and the Rust bit which handles data ingestion via HTTP and JSON is only about 5x faster than the equivalent Ruby code. Obviously, that was a big disappoitment to me. 5x isn't too shabby for something potentially somewhat IO-bound. Presumably the effort wasn't 5x to build and maintain that, so if that's a very hot inner loop of something that's great. What I've found is that using Ruby (mainly gems) idiomatically can just lead to way slower performance. Eg I use time libraries a lot for my day job, and the idiomatic way to write the code had tons of hidden costs and was basically impossible to optimize. So I wrote a ruby extension in rust, and got a 30x speedup on that code - it was pretty computationally intensive, so a perfect fit for this. Part of it was that I was forced to use more primitive types, but in Rust-land I was able to add types all over the primitives and abstract away to my heart's content, without any overhead. That's just something that's impossible in Ruby - each abstraction always has a cost and there's no way around it. If you look at the work Aaron Patterson and Shaun Griffin have done and are doing on AR, or what Peter Ohler has done with Oj, I don't think it's fair to say that either the Rails or Ruby ecosystem doesn't care about performance. They just don't put it before usability by default. Right I wouldn't say nobody cares about performance, some people care a lot and they've been doing great work and helping raise the bar. But overall, the bar is pretty low in the Ruby world. Chris Seaton (one of TruffleRuby's main authors) has a talk where he shows some of the batshit insane code you see in gems, which they had to figure out how to optimize in TruffleRuby/Graal. Code like allocating a new array and calling the `min` method in order to find the smaller of two values! And that was being called in a hot inner loop! In a gem with otherwise great functionality, a nice website and thousands of users. That's the kind of thing you only see in Ruby-land. Also, using method_missing (gotta have that pretty DSL, performance and greppability/discoverability be damned) and monkey-patching/alias-chaining/etc is still common unfortunately (though a smart JIT, ie Graal, can apparently handle that). I am really excited about TruffleRuby and it does really amazing things to optimize crazy Ruby code, so I'm looking forward to Ruby being as fast as say JS in the future. Can't wait for the day I can turn on TruffleRuby in production and halve the AWS bill.
- jashmatthews 9y ago