Why do people say that Ruby is slow

Question

I like Ruby on Rails and I use it for all my web development projects   A few years ago there was a lot of talk about Rails being a memory hog and about how it didn t scale very well but these suggestions were put to bed by Gregg Pollack here   Lately though  I ve been hearing people saying that Ruby itself is slow      Why is Ruby considered slow      I do not find Ruby to be slow but then again  I m just using it to make simple CRUD apps and company blogs   What sort of projects would I need to be doing before I find Ruby becoming slow   Or is this slowness just something that affects all programming languages    What are your options as a Ruby programmer if you want to deal with this  slowness   Which version of Ruby would best suit an application like Stack Overflow where speed is critical and traffic is intense      The questions are subjective  and I realise that architectural setup  EC2 vs standalone servers etc  makes a big difference but I d like to hear what people think about Ruby being slow   Finally  I can t find much news on Ruby 2 0 - I take it we re a good few years away from that then

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The way to deal with Ruby s performance in Web application is the same as with any other programming language   ARCHITECTURE  This is easier to do in Rails than in most other Web Frameworks   At the application level  by caching whatever is supposed to be cached and by managing the access to the DB in an intelligent way  since the bottleneck is usually on the  DB  access for most WEB apps    Rails makes it very easy and natural to solve these problems  There are several abstractions for caching data  pages and fragments  and there are also very nice abstractions to deal with the SQL part in an optimised and reusable fashion  Active Record and AREL    This is the reason why so many applications written in faster and not-so-expressive languages  like php  end up being slower than the Ruby counterparts  It s not so easy and elegant to tackle caching and querying with these languages than it is with Ruby   At the infrastructure level it is reasonable to think of load balancing and all that stuff that I do not happen to know a lot about  I d outsource that problem by hiring some platform as service provider  like Heroku or Engine Yard  Anyway  Deploying rails with load balancing is probably not very hard to do

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People say that Ruby is slow because they compare Ruby programs to programs written in other languages  Maybe the programs you write don t need to be faster  Maybe for the programs you write Ruby isn t the bottleneck that s slowing things down   Ruby 2 1 compared to Javascript V8  Ruby 2 1 compared to ordinary Lua  Ruby 2 1 compared to Python 3

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Ruby performs well for developer productivity  Ruby by nature forces test driven development because of the lack of types  Ruby performs well when used as a high level wrapper for C libraries  Ruby also performs well during long running processes when it is JIT-compiled to machine code via JVM or Rbx VM  Ruby does not perform well when it is required to crunch numbers in a short time with pure ruby code

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The answer is simple  people say ruby is slow because it is slow based on measured comparisons to other languages  Bear in mind  though   slow  is relative  Often  ruby and other  slow  languages are plenty fast enough

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I would say Ruby is slow because not much effort has been spent in making the interpreter faster  Same applies to Python  Smalltalk is just as dynamic as Ruby or Python but performs better by a magnitude  see http   benchmarksgame alioth debian org  Since Smalltalk was more or less replaced by Java and C   that is at least 10 years ago  no more performance optimization work had been done for it and Smalltalk is still ways faster than Ruby and Python  The people at Xerox Parc and at OTI IBM had the money to pay the people that work on making Smalltalk faster  What I don t understand is why Google doesn t spend the money for making Python faster as they are a big Python shop  Instead they spend money on development of languages like Go

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Why is Ruby considered slow    Because if you run typical benchmarks between Ruby and other languages  Ruby loses       I do not find Ruby to be slow but then   again  I m just using it to make   simple CRUD apps and company blogs    What sort of projects would I need to   be doing before I find Ruby becoming   slow  Or is this slowness just   something that affects all programming   languages    Ruby probably wouldn t serve you well in writing a real-time digital signal processing application  or any kind of real-time control system  Ruby  with today s VMs  would probably choke on a resource-constrained computer such as smartphones    Remember that a lot of the processing on your web applications is actually done by software developed in C  e g  Apache  Thin  Nginx  SQLite  MySQL  PostgreSQL  many parsing libraries  RMagick  TCP IP  etc are C programs used by Ruby  Ruby provides the glue and the business logic       What are your options as a Ruby   programmer if you want to deal with   this  slowness     Switch to a faster language  But that carries a cost  It is a cost that may be worth it  But for most web applications  language choice is not a relevant factor because there is just not enough traffic justify using a faster language that costs much more to develop for       Which version of Ruby would best suit   an application like Stack Overflow   where speed is critical and traffic is   intense    Other folks have answered this - JRuby  IronRuby  REE will make the Ruby part of your application run faster on platforms that can afford the VMs  And since it is often not Ruby that causes slowness  but your computer system architecture and application architecture  you can do stuff like database replication  multiple application servers  loadbalancing with reverse proxies  HTTP caching  memcache  Ajax  client-side caching  etc  None of this stuff is Ruby       Finally  I can t find much news on   Ruby 2 0 - I take it we re a good few   years away from that then    Most folks are waiting for Ruby 1 9 1  I myself am waiting for Rails 3 1 on Ruby 1 9 1 on JRuby    Finally  please remember that a lot of developers choose Ruby because it makes programming a more joyful experience compared to other languages  and because Ruby with Rails enables skilled web developers to develop applications very quickly

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First of all  do you care about what others say about the language you like  When it does the job it has to do  you re fine   OO isn t the fastest way to execute code  but it does help in creating the code  Smart code is always faster than dumb code and useless loops  I m an DBA and see a lot of these useless loops  drop them  use better code and queries and application is faster  much faster  Do you care about the last microsecond  You might have languages optimized for speed  others just do the job they have to do and can be maintained by many different programmers   It s all just a choice

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Ruby is slower than C   at a number of easily measurable tasks  e g   doing code that is heavily dependent on floating point   This is not very surprising  but enough justification for some people to say that    Ruby is Slow    without qualification  They don t count the fact that it is far easier and safer to write Ruby code than C     The best fix is to use targeted modules written in another language  e g   C  C    Fortran  in your Ruby code  Those can do the heavy lifting and your scripts can focus on higher level coordination issues

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Obviously  talking about speed Ruby loses  Even though benchmark tests suggest that Ruby is not so much slower than PHP  But in return  you are getting easy-to-maintain DRY code  the best out of all frameworks in various languages    For a small project  you wont feel any slowness  I mean until like  lt 50K users  given that no complex calculations are used in the code  just the mainstream stuff   For a bigger project  paying for resources pays off and is cheaper than developer wages  In addition  writing code on RoR turns out to be much faster than any other   In 2014 this magnitude of speed difference you re talking about is for most websites insignificant

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Here s what the creator of Rails  David Heinemeier Hansson has to say      Rails  Ruby  is for the vast majority   of web applications Fast Enough  We   got sites doing millions of dynamic   page views per day  If you end up   being with the Yahoo or Amazon front   page  it s unlikely that an   off-the-shelve framework in ANY   language will do you much good  You ll   probably have to roll your own  But   sure  I d like free CPU cycles too  I   just happen to care much more about   free developer cycles and am willing   to trade the former for the latter    i e  throwing more hardware or machines at the problem is cheaper than hiring more developers and using a faster  but harder to maintain language  After all  few people write web applications in C   Ruby 1 9 is a vast improvement over 1 8  The biggest problems with Ruby 1 8 are its interpreted nature  no bytecode  no compilation  and that method calls  one of the most common operations in Ruby  are particularly slow   It doesn t help that pretty much everything is a method lookup in Ruby - adding two numbers  indexing an array  Where other languages expose hacks  Python s   add   method  Perl s overload pm  Ruby does pure OO in all cases  and this can hurt performance if the compiler interpreter is not clever enough   If I were writing a popular web application in Ruby  my focus would be on caching  Caching a page reduces the processing time for that page to zero  whatever language you are using  For web applications  database overhead and other I O begins to matter a lot more than the speed of the language  so I would focus on optimising that

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Performance is almost always about good design and optimized database interactions  Ruby does what most web sites need quite fast  especially more recent versions  and the speed of development and ease of maintenance provides a large payoff in costs and in keeping customers happy   I find JAVA to have slow execution performance for some tasks  and given the difficulty of developing in JAVA  many developers create slow applications regardless of the theoretical speed capability as demonstrated in benchmarks  benchmarks are generally contrived to show a specific and narrow capability    When I need intensive processing that isn t well suited to my database s capabilities  I choose C or Objective-C or some other truly high performance compiled language for those tasks depending on the platform   If I need to create a databased web application  I use RoR or sometimes C  ASP NET depending on other requirements  because all platforms have strengths and weaknesses   Execution speed of the things your application does is important  but after all  if execution performance of one narrow aspect of a language is all that counts  then I might still be using Assembler language for everything

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First of all  slower with respect to what   C   Python   Let s get some numbers at the Computer Language Benchmarks Game    Ruby 1 9 vs  Python3 within the same order of magnitude Ruby 1 9 vs  PHP within the same order of magnitude Ruby 1 9 vs  Java 6 server up to two orders of magnitude slower  Ruby 1 9 vs  C  gcc  up to two orders of magnitude slower           Why is Ruby considered slow    Depends on whom you ask   You could be told that    Ruby is an interpreted language and interpreted languages will tend to be slower than compiled ones Ruby uses garbage collection  though C   which also uses garbage collection  comes out two orders of magnitude ahead of Ruby  Python  PHP etc  in the more algorithmic  less memory-allocation-intensive benchmarks above  Ruby method calls are slow  although  because of duck typing  they are arguably faster than in strongly typed interpreted languages  Ruby  with the exception of JRuby  does not support true multithreading etc    But  then again  slow with respect to what   Ruby 1 9 is about as fast as Python and PHP  within a 3x performance factor  when compared to C  which can be up to 300x faster   so the above  with the exception of threading considerations  should your application heavily depend on this aspect  are largely academic      What are your options as a Ruby programmer if you want to deal with this  slowness     Write for scalability and throw more hardware at it  e g  memory      Which version of Ruby would best suit an application like Stack Overflow where speed is critical and traffic is intense    Well  REE  combined with Passenger  would be a very good candidate

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Writing code is slow  Reading code is slow  Finding and fixing bugs is slow  Adding features and enhancements is slow  Anything that improves on the previous is a win  Very rarely is execution performance an issue

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Joel on Software - Ruby Performance Revisited  quite well explains it  Might be outdated though     I would recommend to just stick with it as you re used to Ruby on Rails  if you ever meet a performance issue you might reconsider to use a different language and framework   In that case I would really suggest C  with ASP NET MVC 2  works very well for CRUD apps

[ruby] Why do people say that Ruby is slow?

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