Ruby Performance - The Last Mile - RubyConf India 2016

Ruby Performance
The Last Mile

Charles Oliver Nutter
@headius

Do you want performance today?

Do you want concurrency today?

What you love from Ruby
• Latest Ruby language features
• Mostly-same Ruby standard library
• Pure-Ruby gems work great
• Native gems with JRuby support
• It walks like Ruby, talks like Ruby
• It is Ruby!

With the power of the JVM
• Fast JIT to native code
• Fully parallel threading
• Leading-edge garbage collectors
• Access to Java, Scala, Clojure, ...
• But it's still Ruby!

What do you optimize for?
• Easy to develop with: short time until ﬁrst deploy
• Fast startup: good response cycle at command line
• Straight-line performance, many operations per second
• Parallelism: utilize many cores to get more done

State of the Art:
Production-quality Rubies

Production Quality?
• Support for 99%+ of Ruby language features
• Important parts of standard library
• Runs typical Ruby applications and libraries
• Healthy extension ecosystem
• CRuby, JRuby are the only real options right now

CRuby (MRI)
• Up until 1.9, AST interpreter
• YARV bytecode VM introduced for 1.9.0
• GC and performance improvements through 2.x series
• Ruby 2.3 is latest, released in December
• Future work on JIT, GC, happening now

JRuby
• Many redesigns since creation in 2001
• AST interpreter until 2007
• Simple AST-to-bytecode JIT until JRuby 9000
• Optimizing compiler with JIT for 9k
• JRuby 9.0.5 is current, 9.1 in a couple weeks
• Next-gen Trufﬂe runtime in the works

Lies, damn lies, and
benchmarks

CRuby: red/black tree
0
2
4
6
8
1.8.7 1.9.3 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3

CRuby: red/black tree
0
0.625
1.25
1.875
2.5
1.8.7 1.9.3 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3

JRuby: red/black tree
0
1.25
2.5
3.75
5
JRuby 9.1 CRuby 2.3

JRuby: red/black tree
0
0.6
1.2
1.8
2.4
JRuby 9.1 CRuby 2.3
4x FASTER

Block Pass-through
def foo(&b) 
bar(&b) 
end 
 
def bar 
yield 
end

Block Pass-through
loop { 
puts Benchmark.measure { 
i = 0 
while i < 1_000_000 
i+=1 
foo { }; foo { }; foo { }; foo { }; foo { } 
end 
} 
}

Block Passing
0
0.55
1.1
1.65
2.2
CRuby 2.3 JRuby 1.7.24 JRuby 9.1

deﬁne_method
define_method :add do |a, b| 
a + b 
end

deﬁne_method
0
0.25
0.5
0.75
1
CRuby 2.3 JRuby 1.7.24 JRuby 9.1

Postﬁx rescue
foo rescue nil

csv.rb Converters
Converters = { 
integer: lambda { |f| 
Integer(f.encode(ConverterEncoding)) rescue f 
}, 
float: lambda { |f| 
Float(f.encode(ConverterEncoding)) rescue f 
},

Postﬁx rescue
0
3.5
7
10.5
14
CRuby 2.3 JRuby 9.1

0
3.5
7
10.5
14
CRuby 2.3 JRuby 9.1
Postﬁx rescue

Concurrency? Parallelism?
• Parallelism happens on the harder, e.g. multi-core
• Concurrency happens in the software, e.g. Thread API
• You can have concurrency without parallelism
• You can have both with JRuby

Parallelism in Ruby
• On CRuby, usually process-level
• Ruby threads prevented from running in parallel
• Extensions, IO can opt to release lock
• On JRuby, usually thread-level
• Ruby thread == JVM thread == OS thread
• Single-process, shared memory

A Mailing Queue
• A simple example of concurrency
• For each job, construct an email to send
• Some computation added to make processing heavier
• "Ruby Concurrency and Parallelism: A Practical Tutorial" 
https://www.toptal.com/ruby/ruby-concurrency-and-parallelism-a-
practical-primer

require "./lib/mailer" 
require "benchmark" 
 
puts Benchmark.measure{ 
(ARGV[0] || 10_000).times do |i| 
Mailer.deliver do 
from "eki_#{i}@eqbalq.com" 
to "jill_#{i}@example.com" 
subject "Threading and Forking (#{i})" 
body "Some content" 
end 
end 
}

POOL_SIZE = (ARGV[0] || 10).to_i 
 
jobs = Queue.new 
 
(ARGV[1] || 10_000).to_i.times{|i| jobs.push i} 
 
workers = (POOL_SIZE).times.map do 
Thread.new do 
begin 
while x = jobs.pop(true) 
Mailer.deliver do 
... 
end 
end 
rescue ThreadError 
end 
end 
end 
 
workers.map(&:join)

CRuby: mailer * 1000
TimeinSeconds
0
37.5
75
112.5
150
synchronous 4 threads 4 forks

JRuby: mailer * 1000
0
7
14
21
28
Synchronous 4 Threads

JRuby vs MRI
Times Improvement
0
0.85
1.7
2.55
3.4
CRuby Forks JRuby Threads
3.37x
3.09x

Most users will never
Thread.new

You'll deploy one Rails server
for your entire site

You'll cut your instances
ten times

Libraries and frameworks
will Thread.new for you

And on JRuby,
you'll have more efﬁcient apps

It is possible to write
efﬁcient Ruby code

But it's very easy to write
inefﬁcient Ruby code

Great Features, Hidden Costs
• Blocks are expensive to create, slower than method calls
• case/when is an O(n) cascade of calls
• Singleton classes/methods are costly and hurt method cache
• Literal arrays, hashes, strings have to be constructed, GCed
• Flow-control exceptions can be very expensive and hard to ﬁnd

What happens if your code
does not run fast enough?

CRuby Tooling
• Basic GC stats built in
• Simple proﬁlers in standard library
• Some third-party tools
• stackprof, ruby-prof, perftools.rb, ...

JVM Tooling
• Wide range of GCs: parallel, concurrent, realtime, pauseless
• Built-in tools for analyzing GC, JIT, thread, IO, heap
• Built-in remote monitoring via JMX
• Dozens of tools out there for proﬁling, management, and more

VisualVM
• Graphical console into your application
• Monitor GC, threads, CPU usage
• Sampled or full proﬁling with GUI browser
• Live memory dumping, heap inspection
• Ships with every OpenJDK install

Java Mission Control
• Extremely low-overhead application recording
• Analyze results ofﬂine in JMC
• GC, CPU, heap events, IO operation all browsable
• Commercial feature, free for development use

More on GC
• JVM GCs are incredibly tunable with sensible defaults
• Tools like http://gceasy.io and JClarity give you a deeper view
• These are the best GCs and the best tools in the world

Profiling Tools
• Command line options: --profile, --sample
• JVM command-line profilers like prof
• Many graphical sampling/complete profiling options
• Flame graphs, stack profilers, you name it!

...and this is just the beginning

Thank You!
Charles Oliver Nutter
headius@headius.com
@headius
http://jruby.org
https://github.com/jruby/jruby

Ruby Performance - The Last Mile - RubyConf India 2016

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Ruby Performance - The Last Mile - RubyConf India 2016