Nick Sieger

JRuby Performance Tweaks

Posted by Nick Sieger Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:04:17 GMT

The back-story for my post on JRuby performance is that I was actually doing some benchmarking while applying successive tweaks to the JRuby environment to see how it affected our application performance. Only after running the final set of tweaks for longer numbers of requests did I notice that JRuby was catching up to MRI!

I thought it would be interesting to point out the tweaks themselves, to reiterate the point that JRuby and the JVM give you lots of knobs to tune your application. The notepad of tweaks, numbers and the script used to run them is here.

1. I started by running the application with the “out of the box” setup: JRuby 1.0.1. I then started to apply tweaks to see how the numbers changed.
2. The first tweak was to turn off ObjectSpace, which is pure overhead for JRuby.
3. Next, I enabled JREXML since our application uses ActiveResource.
4. Next, I tried enabling Charlie’s discovery in the rexml/source. It appears that the benefit was negated by JREXML, so I went back and ran another run with the rexml/source patch and without JREXML as 2a. 2a gave almost as much benefit by itself as JREXML, so that’s an option if you don’t want the additional dependency, but you should measure for yourself since the performance profiles of those two fixes for XML may differ depending on the amount of XML consumed. In our case it’s relatively small, a few kilobytes at most.
5. Next, I switched to JRuby trunk instead of 1.0.1. Trunk has, among other improvements, a complete compiler, which should allow more of the application to be translated to Java bytecode.
6. The last tweak for this study was to change to the “server” VM. The server VM is known to take longer to warm up, but is more aggressive in the optimizations it performs.

The beauty of this exercise is that all the changes made provided small performance boosts for the application. Going forward, we hope to make more of this baked-in behavior (ObjectSpace off by default, possibly the rexml/source fix), but it will still help to have knowledge of and play around with the hotspot settings for the JVM.

There are a few more things I’d like to try in the future: JDK 6 is reportedly a lot faster all by itself, and the standalone Glassfish gem may give Mongrel a run for his money. There is still plenty of work left for the impending JRuby 1.1 release, so we should see the performance improvements for Rails applications running on JRuby continue to roll in.