Ruby Performance Optimization

The Need for Speed

It’s a widely shared belief that Ruby is slooow. Ruby, the common wisdom says, is a lovely language that saves you time while you’re developing your application but drags its feet when you execute it. How much truth is there to that belief?

Well, good old Ruby 1.8, released in 2003, was indeed slow. But since then Ruby developers have radically improved the language’s performance. Ruby 1.9 added a virtual machine that executes the code faster. Ruby 2.0 has copy-on-write friendly memory management that makes large web application deployments faster. And finally, thanks to the outstanding work of Koichi Sasada, Ruby got a generational garbage collector in version 2.1 and an incremental garbage collector in 2.2. That work continues ...