Because global variables have a much simpler structure than constants, they're pretty easy to optimize. I had not done so up to JRuby 1.7.1 mostly because I didn't see a compelling use case and didn't want to encourage their use. However, after Tony Arcieri pointed out that invokedyna...
Current Ruby implementations are all built around method dispatch depending solely on the target object's type, and much of the caching and optimization we do depends on that. With refinements in play, we must also search and guard against types in the caller's context, which makes lo...
I was recently asked for a list of "hard problems" a Ruby implementation really needs to solve before reporting benchmark numbers. You know...the sort of problems that might invalidate early perf numbers because they impact how you optimize Ruby. This post is a rework of my response.....
I was recently asked for a list of "hard problems" a Ruby implementation really needs to solve before reporting benchmark numbers. You know...the sort of problems that might invalidate early perf numbers because they impact how you optimize Ruby. This post is a rework of my response.....
JRuby has, for some time now, run the same test suite as MRI (C Ruby, Matz's Ruby). Because not all tests pass, we use minitest-excludes to mask out the failures, and over time we unmask stuff as we fix it. However, there's a number of warnings we get from the suite that are nonfatal ...
This is about 30% faster than JRuby with invokedynamic. It is not doing any boundschecking (for rolling over to Bignum) but it is also not caching 1...256 Fixnum objects like JRuby does, nor caching them in any calls along the way (note that it creates three new RFixnums for every rec...
However, since this post I've learned of the "posix_spawn " function available on most Unix variants. It's basically fork + exec in a single function, plus most of the typical security and IO tweaks you might do after forking and before execing. It's definitely my recommended alternat...
Method Lookup: Ruby's class hierarchy is essentially a tree of hash tables that contain, among other things, methods. Searching for a method involves searching the target object's class. If that fails, you must search the parent class, and so on. In the absence of any sort of caching,...
The biggest advances in startup-time performance have come from users like you investigating the load process to see where all that time is going. If you do a little poking around and find that particular libraries take unreasonably long to start (or just do too much at startup) or if...
-XX:+UseParallelGC turns on the parallel young-generation garbage collector. This is a stop-the-world collector that uses several threads to reduce pause times. There's also -XX:+UseParallelOldGC to use a parallel collector for the old generation, but it's generally only useful if you...
AWSEB is really slow to deploy stuff. Several times it got "stuck" and I waited for more than 30 minutes for it to recover. It did not appear to be an app issue, since the app came up just fine. The default instance size is t1.micro. I was able to get a Rails app to boot there, but it...
It's been a while since I was able to work on JRuby's Android support, but tonight I managed to finally circle back. And I've got something much more impressive working today: a real IRB application! (And yes, this works just fine on the phone too) It turned out to be incredibly easy ...
There's been a little bit of buzz about David Heinemeier Hansson's announcement that Josh Peek has joined Rails core and is about to wrap up his GSoC project making Rails finally be thread-safe. To be honest, there probably hasn't been enough buzz, and there's been several misundersta...
