Ecstortive

Well its been long time and I’ve been sitting quite in a corner waiting for this loud fight between the two Rubies to end. I once had a debate with one of ruby pro (when 1.9.1 was newly out) that JRuby can always stay ahead in speed (There are a-lot details available on how it does that for example this one). I had to start a project recently and choose a platform; ruby was obvious choice, after doing first few iterations when it came to select a database I realised Java has much better support for NoSQL stores than ruby (I can see people getting offended here; but accept it and live with it!) which lead me to the same old discussion in my mind which one is faster? I poked around on Google and found some mixed results. So I made up my mind and decided to do benchmarks myself! Here are the rules of game:

I will give each ruby complete isolation (ruby 1.9.2 and jruby 1.6.3 both latest stables) and 3 runs on same code just before starting off I will take the system time in milliseconds and at the end print out the total time elapsed. Since I don’t care about the start up time consumed I am pretty carelessly selecting jruby optimising “server” mode (perfect for web application scenario). My machine is a normal laptop with Intel Dual Core , 3GB RAM, and a pretty normal HDD.

Time to bust the bubble!

Run 1 focuses on calculation intensive thing; for that I took one of codes from Internet of generating random numbers you can view source code.

Ruby Runtime:

• 2.3871424198150635
• 2.309985637664795
• 2.3948707580566406

JRuby Runtime:

• 2.22599983215332
• 2.19400000572205
• 2.21500015258789

Ok fine (it was close) may be Java’s JIT or something else made.
So, Run 2 focuses on class instantiation and dynamic module extension, you can view source code here.

Ruby Runtime:

• 10.353898525238037
• 10.456978797912598
• 10.417702436447144

JRuby Runtime:

• 7.58999991416931
• 7.75600004196167
• 7.68299984931946

I am stopping right here for now; I mean why can’t a native language code beat a same code on top of JVM? It’s pretty obvious, I have to make some more benchmarks before I make a decision and put the nail in the coffin; So until I do that you people to enjoy this, give me your feedback and may be start thinking about porting your code to JRuby if its worth it!

To be continued…