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Is Ruby slow?

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  • NickENickE New
    edited March 2006
    By the way, in regards to Ruby's speed as a programming language: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all Better than it could be, but definitely not the fastest interpreted langauge.
  • Wait, according to those results, Ruby is faster than PHP? Is that really true?
  • Well from the look of it, they seem to be somewhat even when it comes to speed (PHP's faster more often but by less drastic a difference), but Ruby definitely appears to better at memory management.
  • Wow, so why exactly do people complain about Ruby being dirt-slow compared to PHP? I know a guy who will ONLY use PHP and told me the reason he won't use Ruby is because it is extremely slow and not good for production work.
  • Maybe it's because he KNOWS php and to learn Ruby would slow him down and make his production work suffer? I took a brief crack at Ruby. Wasted a good couple of weeks on it. Accomplished nothing useful. But knowing ye olde php, I could get the job done fairly quickly. Now at the same time, I can watch a video of a guy who KNOWS RoR put together in 15 minutes what would take me a couple hours to do in php from scratch. So I think the old adage YMMV applies. I still look at the RoR stuff (and did again tonight after reading about the new release) with a bit of awe when I see someone who knows how to use it using it. I just haven't been able to wrap my brain around it yet.
  • I think the only reason ruby runs slow is due to the way the server it's running on is set up, otherwise I have seen nothing fairly bad about it. Other than that, while it's not exactly meant for e-commerce, the potential is there, but I would give it a little longer to mature as to most devs it appears to still be a novelty language that's just meant to be toyed with. I see the potential for it growing up to be as huge as php or any other commercially recommended language providing things keep simple within it.
  • I think the major problem is that speed tests are not reliable in every situation, the so called "vacuum" test is not possible. When PHP and Ruby are used side by side in a server running apache with the optimal configurations for both, it's so much more about the platform at that point, not about the speed of the language itself. What is the comparable environment for both languages? Is apache with php the same as lighttpd with scgi? Can we really put the speed on favour of language when it is the platform that is optimized and configured, not the language. But anyone who says that they are not using Ruby because it is so much slower than PHP hasn't obviously used Ruby in right conditions, it is just as fast as PHP when you use it right.
  • I'll back up Kosmo's argument there 100%, that's pretty spot on.
  • NickENickE New
    edited March 2006
    Nevermind...
  • Yeah, well, the guy is literally a genius, and sometimes geniuses do have their little quirks.
  • > Yeah, well, the guy is literally a genius, and sometimes geniuses do have their little quirks. Oh so it's Mark :3
  • SirNot> errr, I read the memory use as being worse in Ruby than in PHP (it uses more memory).
    More than 15x PHP in 2 cases btw.


    I quite agree with RoR 'philosophy': write now and think about scaling later (you'll finish sooner so you'll have plenty of time to find bottlenecks when in production)
  • I've re-installed Rails on my machine at home to start playing with it again (it's nagging at me to really give it a try ... like GIMP was a couple years ago 'til I sat down and learned it). I haven't noticed any real issues with it compared to running PHP on the same machine. (linux/apache/php/mysql/ruby/rails for dev and daily use as our home desktop machine. Sempron64 2500+/1GB RAM/older IDE hard drives) Pages get served up at about the same speed either way. I'm finally getting my head wrapped around Ruby, so soon I'm going to start really digging into Rails. Well, soon could be June or August ... depends when I find time between work and renovations!!
  • NickENickE New
    edited March 2006
    SirNot> errr, I read the memory use as being worse in Ruby than in PHP (it uses more memory).
    More than 15x PHP in 2 cases btw.

    Well according to the graph it shows two >15x memory use lines in the 'Ruby better' section, so I'm assuming that means Ruby's 15x better than php in those instances, although I could be wrong.
  • ah, you are right! I definitely didn't understand this graph. The shame is I didn't see the table below until now :(

    OK then Fortran is faster and smaller than PHP (and harder) or than Lisp , the contrary seemed a bit odd :-)
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