Awesome Ruby Performance

A curated list of awesome Ruby Performance books, courses, trainings, conference talks, blogs and most inspiring open source contributors. To get even more insights about performance you can take a look at wiki pages, they are work in progress now, but expect them to have more info.

• Awesome Ruby Performance
  • Contributions
  • Books
  • Video Courses
  • On-Site Trainings
  • Upcoming conferences
  • Conference Talks
  • Blogs
  • Inspiring Open Source Contributors
  • Performance tools
  • High Performance Libraries
  • Benchmarks
  • Article series
    • Benchmarking
    • Monitoring
    • Investigations
    • JIT Optimizations
    • Threading
    • Memory
    • RubyVM Internals
  • Official Ruby bugtracker notes
    • CPU Improvements
    • Memory Improvements
  • Interesting performance talks not about Ruby

Contributions

Have you ever seen an interesting talk about Ruby performance and it's not listed here? Send a pull request. Have you ever read an interesting article about Ruby performance and it's not listed here? Send a pull request. Did you write an article? Send a pull request. Know interesting blogger, who writes about Ruby performance? You know what to do!

Do not forget to include a language remark: 🇯🇵 🇰🇷 🇩🇪 🇨🇳 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 🇮🇹 🇷🇺 🇬🇧

Books

• Ruby Performance Optimization by Alexander Dymo 🇺🇸
• Ruby Under a Microscope by Pat Shaughnessy 🇺🇸

Video Courses

• TODO

On-Site Trainings

• TODO

Upcoming conferences

• TODO

Conference talks

Sorted from newest to oldest:

• 2019
  • Ruby CPU and Memory - Pareto principle by Юлиан Покровский (Oct 27, 2019, RubyRussia) 🇷🇺
• 2015
  • On Memory by John Crepezzi (Mar 30, 2015, MountainWest RubyConf) 🇺🇸
• Older
  • TODO

Blogs

• SpeedShop 🇺🇸

Inspiring Open Source Contributors

• Nate Berkopec 🇺🇸
• Sam Saffron
• Peter Ohler

Performance tools

• Benchmarking
  • benchmark-ips - Provides iteration per second benchmarking for Ruby.
• Profiling
  • Rack
    • Derailed Benchmarks - A series of things you can use to benchmark a Rails or Ruby app.
    • rack-mini-profiler - Profiler for your development and production Ruby rack apps.
  • Pure Ruby
    • batch-loader – A generic lazy batching mechanism to avoid N+1 DB queries, HTTP queries, etc.
    • bullet - Help to kill N+1 queries and unused eager loading.
    • Peek - Visual status bar showing Rails performance.
    • stackprof - a sampling call-stack profiler for ruby 2.1+
    • Rbkit - profiler for Ruby. With a GUI.
    • rbspy - Sampling profiler for any Ruby process.
    • ruby-prof - A code profiler for MRI rubies.
    • speedscope - A fast, interactive web-based viewer for performance profiles. An alternative viewer for FlameGraphs. Will happily display multi-megabyte profiles without crashing your browser.
• Linters, recommendation tools (possibly runnable on CI)
  • fasterer - Don't make your Rubies go fast. Make them go fasterer

Application Insights

• New_Relic
• SkyLight - smart profiler for Ruby and Rails applications

High Performance Libraries

• Booting code
  • bootsnap - Boot large Ruby/Rails apps faster.
• C/Rust extensions
  • fast_blank - Provides a C-optimized method for determining if a string is blank.
  • yajl-ruby - A streaming JSON parsing and encoding library for Ruby (C bindings to yajl).
  • oj - A fast JSON parser and Object marshaller as a Ruby gem.
• Memory
  • nakayoshi_fork - solves CoW friendly problem on MRI 2.2 and later

Benchmarks

• Ruby in Web
  • Concurrent HTTP requests in Ruby
  • Benchmark some Ruby web microframeworks, just for fun

Article series

Benchmarking

• The Art of Benchmarking by Matt Warren

Monitoring

• TODO

Investigations

• Как я провёл две недели в поисках утечки памяти by Олег Дашевский. "Это история о поисках утечки памяти. Она довольно длинная, потому что я привожу массу подробностей. Почему я решил описать свои приключения? Дело не только в практическом стремлении сохранить все мелкие скрипты и куски кода. Мне на минуточку показалось, что это и есть UNIX way – то, что меня вело. Каждый шаг был связан с очередной небольшой утилитой или библиотекой, которая хорошо решает свою задачу. И я в итоге достиг успеха." 🇷🇺
• How I spent two weeks hunting a memory leak in Ruby by Oleg Dashevskii. "This is a story about hunting a memory leak. A long story, because I go into much detail. Why describe my adventures? Not that I wanted to save all those tiny code pieces and scripts only. It rather occurred to me that it was UNIX way which I had pursued. Every step was related to yet another small utility, or a library, which solves its task well. And finally I succeeded." 🇺🇸

JIT Optimizations

• TODO

Threading

• TODO

Memory

• Debugging hidden memory leaks in Ruby - "This article covers tools and tricks you can use to attack leaks that you can not easily introspect in Ruby. In particular I will discuss mwrap, heaptrack, iseq_collector and chap." by Sam Saffron (2019-10-15) 🇺🇸
• What causes Ruby memory to bloat - How memory allocation works in Ruby and how to improve it with malloc_trim API. 🇺🇸
• The Definitive Guide to Ruby Heap Dumps, Part I - “When you can’t reproduce memory bloat, here’s how to work with a heap dump.” by Richard Schneeman (Last updated: 2017-06-19) 🇺🇸
• The Definitive Guide to Ruby Heap Dumps, Part II- “When you can’t reproduce memory bloat, here’s how to work with a heap dump.” by Richard Schneeman (Last updated: 2017-06-19) 🇺🇸

RubyVM Internals

• TODO

Official Ruby bugtracker notes

CPU Improvements

• TODO

Memory Improvements

• 2019
  • Introduce malloc_trim(0) in full gc cycles - Per Hongli's excellent article it looks like malloc_trim can help tremendously with memory bloat issues. 🇺🇸
• 2018
  • set M_ARENA_MAX for glibc malloc - Not everybody benefits from jemalloc and the extra download+install time is not always worth it. Lets make the user experience for glibc malloc users better, too. 🇺🇸
  • Use jemalloc by default? 🇺🇸

Interesting performance talks not about Ruby

• Emery Berger 🇺🇸
• Carl Cook 🇺🇸
• Brendan Gregg blog 🇺🇸