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One of the most popular rants against ruby are based on its not so good performance.

Actually has been made improvements on this topic, specially in the new Ruby implementation (Ruby 1.9) based on the YARV virtual machine.

JRuby (Ruby over JVM implementation) has been focused in its performance from its lastest releases. Here at moove-it we are exploring the posibility of use Rails over JRuby in some JEE application servers, so we need some facts about JRuby performance (and other topics like gems compatibility, etc)

The Ruby community has put a set of benchmarks at ruby1.9 trunk: http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/trunk/benchmark/

So, we test with these benchmarks and here are the results!.

The code that run the benchmarks is like that:

block_to_benchmark = lambda { load BENCHMARKS_DIR + '/' + filename}
Benchmark.measure &block_to_benchmark

(yes, we are using the benchmark module bundled with the ruby standard lib)

.

A looser conclusion may be that Ruby 1.9 is 95% faster than Ruby1.8, and JRuby 1.3.0 is 10% faster than 1.8, in general the new implementations are faster than Ruby1.8,  especially 1.9 (twice as faster).

The benchmarks were under WindowsXP  SP3, 4GB RAM, and a Intel Core 2 duo 2.0GHz. Happy hacking!

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Reducing the number of request made to the server improves the performance of a web application in about 80%.

There are many techniques that allow us to reduce the amount of requests that are made on a page, among them are: the sprites, put the stylesheets on top of the page, javascripts compress, among others.

But what’s offered by Rails to improve the performance of our web application?

It offers a great plugin called bundle_fu (http://code.google.com/p/bundle-fu/)
It allows us with a single request obtain all the javascripts and with another request all the stylesheets  (it also offers the possibility of compress javascripts).
Using this plugin is really easy but it’s very powerfull

<% bundle do -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :default -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript1" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript2" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript3" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style1" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style2" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style3" -%>
  ...
<% end %>

All these javascripts and stylesheets are converted in only two files when the request is processed.

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