Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 16:00:28 +0900
   From: Dave Thomas <Dave / PragmaticProgrammer.com>

   Eric Sven Ristad <ristad / mnemonic.com> writes:

   > It would be great if Ruby would instrument system resources, such as
   > user cpu time, system cpu time, current process size, and current
   > memory allocation.  Having direct access to these quantities in Ruby
   > would be useful both in debugging libraries and benchmarking parts of
   > programs in context of actual use.

   Have you come across Ruby's profile facility?

I find that profiling is a useful but somewhat crude tool for tuning
performance.  Sometimes I need to instrument specific blocks of code;
othertimes I need to report incremental resource utilization in a
long-running program.  Profiling, while useful in many circumstances,
is not a replacement for instrumenting system resources.

Eric