Benchmarking RDiscount
The last benchmarks I posted, running Thin, were rather unfair against Rubinius (as Evan has pointed out). Time has passed in which I have been busy getting more specs to pass (only 8 failures and 2 errors are left) and I have found another gem with a benchmarking script for me to run ;) The RDiscount gem which implements Markdown in C.
I just ran rake build benchmark on Ree (2010.02),
Rubinius (1.0.1 20100603) and the JRuby cext branch and got these
numbers:
| BlueCloth: | 07.433000s total time | 00.074330s average |
| RDiscount: | 00.124000s total time | 00.001240s average |
| Maruku: | 11.619000s total time | 00.116190s average |
| BlueCloth: | 08.029169s total time | 00.080292s average |
| RDiscount: | 00.046740s total time | 00.000467s average |
| Maruku: | 06.500247s total time | 00.065002s average |
| BlueCloth: | 00.062746s total time | 00.000627s average |
| RDiscount: | 00.056345s total time | 00.000563s average |
| Maruku: | 21.178625s total time | 00.211786s average |
It’s clear how Ree is fastest with the C extension, but Rbx is not much behind. And even though JRuby’s cext implementation seems to be around 3 times slower for RDiscount than the other implementations, it’s still almost 60times faster than BlueCloth and around 90times faster than Maruku (compared to 1/171/139 on Ree and 1/1/375 on Rbx for RDiscount/BlueCloth/Maruku).
Also note how Ree is the only one where Maruku is actually fast and also how bloody fast BlueCloth runs on Rubinius!
So while the cext support for JRuby is comparatively slow, there are clearly cases where it might yield a performance gain.