home_run is an implementation of ruby’s Date/DateTime classes in C, with much better performance (20-200x) than the version in the standard library, while being almost completely compatible.
The speedup you’ll get depends mostly on your version of ruby, but also on your operating system, platform, and compiler. Here are some comparative results for common methods:
# | i386 | i386 | i386 | i386 | amd64 | # |Windows| Linux | Linux | Linux |OpenBSD| # | 1.8.6 | 1.8.7 | 1.9.1 | 1.9.2 | 1.9.2 | # |-------+-------+-------+------ +-------| Date.civil | 82x | 66x | 27x | 21x | 14x | Date.parse | 56x | 56x | 33x | 30x | 25x | Date.today | 17x | 6x | 2x | 2x | 2x | Date.strptime | 43x | 62x | 63x | 37x | 23x | DateTime.civil | 252x | 146x | 52x | 41x | 17x | DateTime.parse | 52x | 54x | 32x | 27x | 20x | DateTime.now | 78x | 35x | 11x | 8x | 4x | DateTime.strptime | 63x | 71x | 58x | 35x | 23x | Date#strftime | 156x | 104x | 110x | 70x | 62x | Date#+ | 34x | 32x | 5x | 5x | 4x | Date#<< | 177x | 220x | 86x | 72x | 40x | Date#to_s | 15x | 6x | 5x | 4x | 2x | DateTime#strftime | 146x | 107x | 114x | 71x | 60x | DateTime#+ | 34x | 37x | 8x | 6x | 3x | DateTime#<< | 88x | 106x | 40x | 33x | 16x | DateTime#to_s | 144x | 47x | 54x | 29x | 24x |
The standard library Date class is slow enough to be the bottleneck in much (if not most) of code that uses it. Here’s a real world benchmark showing the retrieval of data from a database (using Sequel), first without home_run, and then with home_run.
$ script/console production
Loading production environment (Rails 2.3.5)
>> require 'benchmark'
=> false
>> puts Benchmark.measure{Employee.all}
0.270000 0.020000 0.290000 ( 0.460604)
=> nil
>> puts Benchmark.measure{Notification.all}
2.510000 0.050000 2.560000 ( 2.967896)
=> nil
$ home_run script/console production
Loading production environment (Rails 2.3.5)
>> require 'benchmark'
=> false
>> puts Benchmark.measure{Employee.all}
0.100000 0.000000 0.100000 ( 0.114747)
=> nil
>> puts Benchmark.measure{Notification.all}
0.860000 0.010000 0.870000 ( 0.939594)
Without changing any application code, there’s a 4x increase when retrieving all employees, and a 3x increase when retrieving all notifications. The main reason for the performance difference between these two models is that Employee has 5 date columns, while Notification only has 3.
gem install home_run
The standard gem requires compiling from source, so you need a working compiler toolchain. Since few Windows users have a working compiler toolchain, a windows binary gem is available that works on both 1.8 and 1.9.
This is only necessary on ruby 1.8, as on ruby 1.9, gem directories come before the standard library directories in the load path.
After installing the gem:
home_run --install
Installing into site_ruby means that ruby will always use home_run’s Date/DateTime classes instead of the ones in the standard library.
If you ever want to uninstall from site_ruby:
home_run --uninstall
Just like installing into site_ruby, this should only be necessary on ruby 1.8.
If you don’t want to install into site_ruby, you can use home_run’s Date/DateTime classes for specific programs by running your script using home_run:
home_run ruby ... home_run irb ... home_run unicorn ... home_run rake ...
This manipulates the RUBYLIB and RUBYOPT environment variables so that home_run’s Date/DateTime classes will be used.
You can also just require the library:
require 'home_run'
This should only be used as a last resort. Because rubygems requires date, you can end up with situations where the Date instances created before the require use the standard library version of Date, while the Date instances created after the require use this library’s version. However, in some cases (such as on Heroku), this is the only way to easily use this library.
You can run the rubyspec based specs after installing the gem, if you have MSpec installed (gem install mspec):
home_run --spec
If there are any failures, please report them as a bug.
You can run the benchmarks after installing the gem:
home_run --bench
The benchmarks compare home_run’s Date/DateTime classes to the standard library ones, showing you the amount of time an average call to each method takes for both the standard library and home_run, and the number of times home_run is faster or slower. Output is in CSV, so an entry like this:
Date._parse,362562,10235,35.42
means that:
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The standard library’s Date._parse averaged 362,562 nanoseconds per call.
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home_run’s Date._parse averaged 10,235 nanoseconds per call.
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Therefore, home_run’s Date._parse method is 35.42 times faster
The bench task tries to be fair by ensuring that it runs the benchmark for at least two seconds for both the standard library and home_run’s versions.
home_run aims to be compatible with the standard library, except for differences mentioned below. So you can use it the same way you use the standard library.
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Written in C (mostly) instead of ruby. Stores information in a C structure, and therefore has a range limitation. home_run cannot handle dates after 5874773-08-15 or before -5877752-05-08 on 32-bit platforms (with larger limits for 64-bit platforms).
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The Date class does not store fractional days (e.g. hours, minutes), or offsets. The DateTime class does handle fractional days and offsets.
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The DateTime class stores fractional days as the number of nanoseconds since midnight, so it cannot deal with differences less than a nanosecond.
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Neither Date nor DateTime uses rational. Places where the standard library returns rationals, home_run returns integers or floats.
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Because rational is not used, it is not required. This can break other libraries that use rational without directly requiring it.
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There is no support for modifying the date of calendar reform, the sg arguments are ignored and the Gregorian calendar is always used. This means that julian day 0 is -4173-11-24, instead of -4712-01-01.
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The undocumented Date#strftime format modifiers are not supported.
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The DateTime offset is checked for reasonableness. home_run does not support offsets with an absolute difference of more than 14 hours from UTC.
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DateTime offsets are stored in minutes, so it will round offsets with fractional minutes to the nearest minute.
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All public class and instance methods for both Date and DateTime are implemented, except that the allocate class method is not available and on 1.9, _dump and _load are used instead of marshal_dump and marshal_load.
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Only the public API is compatible, the private methods in the standard library are not implemented.
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The marshalling format differs from the one used by the standard library. Note that the 1.8 and 1.9 standard library date marshalling formats differ from each other.
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Date#step treats the step value as an integer, so it cannot handle steps of fractional days. DateTime#step can handle fractional day steps, though.
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When parsing the %Q modifier in _strptime, the hash returned includes an Integer :seconds value and a Float :sec_fraction value instead of a single rational :seconds value.
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The string returned by #inspect has a different format, since it doesn’t use rational.
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The conversion of 2-digit years to 4-digit years in Date._parse is set to true by default. On ruby 1.8, the standard library has it set to false by default.
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You can use the Date::Format::STYLE hash to change how to parse DD/DD/DD and DD.DD.DD date formats, allowing you to get ruby 1.9 behavior on 1.8 or vice-versa. This is probably the only new feature in that isn’t in the standard library.
Any other differences will either be documented here or considered bugs, so please report any other differences you find.
home_run uses GitHub Issues for tracking issues/bugs:
http://github.com/jeremyevans/home_run/issues
The source code is on GitHub:
http://github.com/jeremyevans/home_run
To get a copy:
git clone git://github.com/jeremyevans/home_run.git
There are a few requirements:
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Rake
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Ragel 6.5+ for building the ragel parser. The compiled C file is included in the gem, so people installing the gem don’t need Ragel. The compiled C file is not checked into git, so you need Ragel if you are working with a git checkout.
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MSpec (not RSpec) for running the specs. The specs are based on the rubyspec specs, which is why they use MSpec.
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RDoc 2.5.10+ if you want to build the documentation.
The directory layout is slightly unusual in that there is no lib directory and there are .rb files in the ext directory. This may change in a future version.
To build the library from a git checkout, after installing the requirements:
rake parser build
The default rake task runs the specs, so just run:
rake
You need to build the library and install MSpec before running the specs.
To see the speedup that home_run gives you over the standard library:
rake bench
To see how much less memory home_run uses compared to the standard library:
rake mem_bench
To see how much less garbage is created when instantiating objects with home_run compared to the standard library:
rake garbage_bench
If you want to run all three benchmarks at once:
rake bench_all
home_run has been tested on the following:
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Linux (x86_64, i386)
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Mac OS X 10.6 (x86_64, i386)
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OpenBSD (amd64, i386)
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Windows XP (i386)
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gcc (3.3.5, 4.2.1, 4.4.3, 4.5.0)
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jruby cext branch (as of commit 1969c504229bfd6f2de1, 2010-08-23, compiles and runs specs correctly, segfaults on benchmarks)
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rbx head (as of commit 0e265b92727cf3536053, 2010-08-16)
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ruby 1.8.6 (p0, p398, p399)
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ruby 1.8.7 (p174, p248, p299, p302)
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ruby 1.9.1 (p243, p378, p429, p430)
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ruby 1.9.2 (p0)
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ruby head
If your platform, compiler version, or ruby version is not listed above, please test and send me a report including:
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Your operating system and platform (e.g. i386, x86_64/amd64)
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Your compiler
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Your ruby version
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The output of home_run –spec
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The output of home_run –bench
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Expand main ragel parser to handle more formats
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Add ragel versions of the 1.9 date parsing functions
Jeremy Evans <[email protected]>