Shanti’s Dispatches

The elephant in the corner in the Ruby community has long been the speed of the Ruby VM.

People have finally started talking about this issue. Ruby, in its present state, is “fast enough.” It will get the job done, you might need a few extra dispatch.fcgi’s or mongrel instances in your mongrel cluster, but you will have a scalable N-tier system.

This excellent Ruby VM shoot-out does a great job comparing the current state of various Ruby VMs.

YARV is rumored to be the next Ruby VM, taking over for the previous VM in Ruby 2.0.

From the shoot-out, it’s clear why. YARV performs 3.47 faster (on average) than the current Ruby VM.

Implications of a 3x Faster Ruby VM

Deployment issues aside, it does take some planning on how/when you’ll deploy RoR applications. I’ve got a PHP box that serves up 30+ PHP apps (low traffic). You can do this without much thought.

While I imagine guys at Engine Yard and specialized RoR deployment shops have figured out some clever ways to deploy tons of Rails apps on a single server, for the average developer, you’re not putting more than 1-3 Rails apps on a box.

If the Ruby VM required 3x less fastcgi’s / mongrels, it would make deploying Rails apps a no-brainer. You wouldn’t have to worry that 3 mongrels are using 100MB+ of RAM (when RAM always seems to be the most scarce resource), chewing up CPU, etc.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos