Happy (Belated) Birthday Ruport

I need to wish the Ruport project a belated “happy birthday”. I turns out that they turned two yesterday, Gregory Brown made the announcement on the ruby-talk list:

Just a quick bit of trivia:

Two years ago today, Ruport 0.1.0 was released on RubyForge.

He also mentioned that they’d be making the 41st public release of Ruport to celebrate. This isn’t just a ‘birthday release’ without any added value though. It’s a full on 1.2 release loaded with goodies for the discriminating Ruport user, and a few incompatibilities with the 1.0 version. Some of the major enhancements include:

• Table#sort_rows_by now allows nil objects and allows ascending / descending order
• Table constructors now accept :filters and :transforms Procs
• AAR’s report_table() now accept :filters and :transforms Procs
• Grouping constructor accepts :order, and new Grouping#sort_grouping_by method
• Formatter::PDF#draw_table now exposes column heading formatting options
• Renderers can now be passed :file => “somefile.txt” to save output

There are some flat-out new features as well:

• Data::Feeder allows for custom transformations and filters on data
• Grouping#sigma added (Thanks Dave Nelson)
• Formatter::PDF#draw_text! will draw text at an absolute position, ignoring margins
• Formatter::Template provides a simple templating system for renderer options

Congratulations to the whole Ruport team on a good looking 1.2, and on 2 great years. I wish them many happy returns.

JRuby 1.0.1 - Real World Performance

The other day, Thomas Enebo and the JRuby gang cut a 1.0.1 release of JRuby and I finally got around to benchmarking it against my LogWatchR app. I used the same data set and Ruby versions as previously (I need to upgrade my 1.9.0 install to see how that work's been going, but it won't happen today). (You can see the previous version of this benchmark here.)

This time around, JRuby showed significant performance improvements. (Oddly, the 1.8 and 1.9 benchmarks looked better too, I don't know if that's from a small code change or just that my system is running a little bit lighter these days.) My stock Ruby install ran the tests in an average of 9.294 seconds (+/- .41 seconds). My 1.9 install run them in 9.394 seconds (+/- .11). The JRuby results are a bit more involved:

• no flags
  14.754 sec (+/- .26)
• jruby -J-Djruby.jit.threshold=0 -J-server -O logwatcher.rb
  19.370 sec (+/- .31)
• jruby -J-Djruby.jit.threshold=0 -O logwatcher.rb
  13.226 sec (+/- .30)
• jruby -J-Djruby.jit.threshold=1 -O logwatcher.rb
  13.256 sec (+/- .25)

All this means that JRuby is now 142-159% as slow as the installed version of Ruby for LogWatchR. That's a pretty big improvement over the 223-278% it was at the last time I ran the tests. Not bad for a test that Charles Nutter told me didn't have many performance fixes in it. I can't wait to see what happens when the JRuby guys actually start to work on performance.

rubinius is still not up to running LogWatchR, but it looks like the 0.10 version (expected in October) will be the release I get to start using. In the meantime, rubinius performance is starting to look pretty good too.

If you enjoyed this article on profiling, you might also want to look at these:

• Some Real World Performance Notes
• More Real World Performance Notes
• JRuby 1.1 Performance Numbers