Roger Pack wrote:
>> YARV and Ruby's poor computational performance. Zed said, and I quote:
>>
>>> I?ll be honest right away though and say that Ruby is slow. The  
>>> Ruby community has been ignoring the huge ?performance? elephant  
>>> standing in the room and they need to start talking about it so it  
>>> goes away. Elephants hate being talked about. There are a few  
>>> efforts to make Ruby faster, but I see a lot less action than is  
>>> needed to solve the problem. One solution in the works is a real  
>>> virtual machine called Rite (or YARV depending on who you talk to)  
>>> which is showing some real promise and seems to be speed  
>>> competitive with the fastest Java implementations.
> 
> Yeah I have come to the sad conclusion that, at least with the 1.8.x 
> world, if speedy execution is your goal you should probably choose 
> another scripting language [python+psycho comes to mind].  Especially 
> when considered in conjunction with rails.  There I have mentioned the 
> elephant :)
> That being said, thankfully 95% of web pages and scripts don't really 
> care about getting hammered, since they never will be.  But the other 5% 
> will suffer until this gets figured out.  And I'm not volunteering. 
> Hopefully this will improve in the near future.  Until then back to my 
> coding of some poorly performing, elegantly written web pages.
> -R

Well, Zed's rant *was* published some time ago -- before the 1.9.0 
release, I think. I know very little has changed in the MRI performance 
arena, but "Rite" and "YARV" are the same thing as far as I know and 
are/is indeed faster at the core than MRI.

As far as Rails is concerned, though, quite a bit of work is available 
on the web on hacks for tuning it, things to avoid in your Ruby code, 
etc. I suspect there is more that *isn't* publicly available on tuning 
Rails.

The way I interpret open source licenses, if you take an open source 
toolset, squeeze all the major bottlenecks out of it and put it into 
production in a server, there's no requirement for you to release the 
source of your hacks as long as you don't attempt to distribute the 
resulting binaries. :)

I've speculated a bit on what I think might happen in my blog.

http://ruby-perspectives.blogspot.com/2008/06/ruby-rails-and-life-on-edge-of-chaos.html