Programming Ruby 3.3

Debugging Performance Issues with Benchmark

Ruby is an interpreted, high-level language, and as such it may not perform as fast as a lower-level language such as C. In the following sections, we’ll list some basic things you can do to inspect its performance.

Typically, slow-running programs have one or two performance graveyards—places where execution time goes to die. Find and improve them, and suddenly your whole program springs back to life. The trick is finding them—developers are notoriously bad at guessing where performance hangups actually are. The Benchmark module can help.

You can use the Benchmark module to time sections of code. For example, we may wonder what the overhead of method invocation is. You can use Benchmark.bm or Benchmark.bmbm ...