Ruby Performance Optimization

Benchmark

Let’s take everything you learned in the previous chapter on measurements and apply that knowledge here to write a benchmark function. To reiterate, here’s what such a function should do:

• Run the code multiple times to gather measurements. It’s best if we can do 30 runs or more.

• Skip the results of the first run to reduce the warm-up effects and let caching do its job.

• Force GC before each run.

• Fork the process before measurement to make sure all runs are isolated and don’t interfere with each other.

• Store all measurements somewhere (in the file, on S3, etc.) to be processed later.

• Calculate and report average performance and its standard deviation.

This list makes for a pretty detailed spec, so let’s go ahead and write ...