50.000 times too slow?

Recently I was in urged to do a web project with the latest and coolest web framework Ruby on Rails. That's just one line of code grabbed from somewhere: next if entry =~ /^\./ Ruby is said to read like a natural language, but for my eyes this is just a cryptic sequence. Maybe I have the wrong natural language. So to clarify what it means I translated it to some assembly language: cmp (entryptr),'.' beq next Yes: if the entry begins with '.', skip it. The latter code might take 2 CPU cycles to execute. How much will the Ruby code take? There is the line to be interpreted (syntax check, AST creation,... no idea), than a regexp engine is started which starts parsing the expression before it tries to find a match. All this is accompanied by lots of heap activity. My guess: 100.000 cycles. At least. So it's 50.000 times slower than it needs to be to get the work done. Who needs a cluster of 50.000 machines to serve his application? Well, all others should be well of with a single server, even a poor one, if it only was programmed with care. I know it's unfair and untrue, so please don't comment on that. But ... to some respect it is true.

Date: July, 19 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/herkules/archive/2010/07/19/50000-times-too-slow

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