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Adam Kramer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was seeing significant performance differences between ruby 1.8.4 on
> an old distribution and a newer one. I spent some hours tracking down
> the differences and it appears that --enable-pthread causes ruby to be
> significantly slower. I tried searching for the reason why this is but
> came up empty handed.
> 
> On Ubuntu 6.06 I built a new binary of 1.8.4 (from the package source
> - nothing else was different) with --disable-pthread and compared the
> execution times of the benchmark files in SVN. Here are the results:
> 
> Second column is with --enable-pthread, third column
> --disable-pthread. Look at almost every test that took more than a
> second, of real note is app_pentomino and loop_times.
> app_answer      0.674           0.504
> app_factorial   0.020           0.013
> app_fib      9.377           6.623
> app_mandelbrot  2.384           1.862
> app_pentomino   158.618         84.739
> app_raise       1.176           0.964
> app_strconcat   1.197           1.215
> app_tak 12.390          8.158
> app_tarai       9.872           6.473
> loop_generator  22.547          15.394
> loop_times      11.616          4.050
> loop_whileloop  9.334           9.491
> loop_whileloop2 1.878           1.906
> so_ackermann    5.038           9.291
> so_array        10.608          6.376
> so_concatenate  3.633           1.620
> so_count_words  0.272           0.267
> so_exception    3.012           2.221
> so_lists        1.302           1.023
> so_matrix       2.753           1.906
> so_nested_loop  9.877           5.060
> so_object       5.705           3.780
> so_random       1.967           1.752
> so_sieve        0.627           0.591
> vm1_block       35.529          19.547
> vm1_const       14.287          14.482
> vm1_ensure      28.497          15.053
> vm1_length      18.162          18.991
> vm1_rescue      18.771          11.221
> vm1_simplereturn        31.387          16.038
> vm1_swap        16.581          16.850
> vm2_array       4.078           4.129
> vm2_case        4.041           4.076
> vm2_method      21.762          9.765
> vm2_mutex       31.299          17.910
> vm2_poly_method 25.094          13.121
> vm2_poly_method_ov      4.192           4.125
> vm2_proc        8.404           5.506
> vm2_regexp      3.919           3.743
> vm2_send        5.280           3.780
> vm2_super       7.573           4.337
> vm2_unif1       4.833           3.183
> vm2_zsuper      8.120           4.848
> vm3_thread_create_join  0.012           0.008
> vm3_thread_mutex        5.787           3.278
> 
> It appears that when compiled with --enable-pthread ruby will call
> sigprocmask MANY MANY more times than without. You can verify this
> with strace -c:
> $ strace -c ruby -e '1.upto(100000) {|i| i.to_s}'
> % time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
> ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
> 100.00    0.000655           0    200006           sigprocmask
> 
> Yeah - it called sigprocmask over 200,000 times during that 100,000
> iteration loop.
> 
> When compiled with --disable-pthread and running the same command,
> rt_sigprocmask gets called 4 times.
> 
> I also tested on OS X, ruby is compiled with --enable-pthread but
> sigprocmask doesn't get called an inordinate number of times, so this
> may be a linux-only issue.
> 
> Has anyone else witnessed this? Is this a "feature" that's to be expected?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Thanks!
> -Adam
> 
> 

Yeah -- it's probably not only Linux-specific but also dependent on your
 compiler and run time library versions. What I would suggest is
compiling Ruby with profiling and seeing where in the Ruby interpreter
these calls are.

Incidentally, if you use Tk and Ruby, both have to be compiled with the
same setting for pthread usage.

(cross-posted to Ruby Core) :)
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