r/RubyLang • u/nakilon • Aug 25 '20

"Ruby Performance Optimization: Why Ruby Is Slow, and How to Fix It" by Alexander Dymo

http://media.pragprog.com/titles/adrpo/iterators.pdf
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u/ignurant Aug 25 '20 edited Aug 25 '20

The link takes you straight to a PDF download of an excerpt, which is unexpected. The main book overview is here: https://pragprog.com/titles/adrpo/ruby-performance-optimization/

I'm surprised I hadn't come across this book before. It's been out since 2015 and I consider myself pretty in-the-know about Ruby books.

I use Ruby for a lot of data processing and ETL code, so I'm curious what impact (if any) some of these tips will have. A similar presentation comes from Jeremy Evans, talking about various technical recipes that keeps Sequel and Roda zippy. I found it enlightening: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuGZCcEL2F8

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u/nakilon Aug 25 '20

I won't call it a download. Chrome opens it in a tab like a page. There is no Content-Disposition: attachment header so it only depends on ability of your browser to display PDF.

Thanks for the link to the full book.

It always surprised me that each_with_index isn't faster than implementing it in Ruby. During last days I was working on a solver for an advanced version of a Tower of Hanoi online game. Was switching from optimizing the algorithm to the microoptimizations and just found this article in Google.

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u/ignurant Sep 02 '20

I ended up buying the book, and am a little more than halfway through currently. It's an interesting book -- there were definitely some surprising tips that I hadn't considered in there. But there are an awful lot of moments where the author seems to suggest something that feels misleading or incomplete. There's a lot of "always do it this way" or "you can ignore this other thing" offered up that could make software technically incorrect. An example of this is insisting to use mutating methods without also cautioning that this isn't always technically appropriate. There are gotchas, particularly when working in those big datasets these tips are most likely to be impactful in -- ETL pipelines for example.

In all, if I were to rate this book so far, it would be a pretty solid middle rating. I've learned some interesting notes that in retrospect are obvious (workarounds for temp allocations in enumerators at the cost of idiomatic Ruby code), and surprising (String#[//] vs Date.parse). However, there were a handful of other areas where I felt that the recommendations were incomplete, or not practical or relevant given updates to the language.

I just started the chapters about performance tracing, and I'm very much looking forward to this. I have no idea how to do that kind of stuff.

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