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Bug #11396

closed

Bad performance in ruby >= 2.2 for Hash with many symbol keys

Added by brunoe (Bruno Escherl) over 8 years ago. Updated over 8 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:70129]

Description

This started out as an issue on stackoverflow, where I found strange performance anomalies when comparing Set.include? and Array.include? in different ruby versions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31631284/performance-anomaly-in-ruby-set-include-with-symbols-2-2-2-vs-2-1-6

In the end it came down to problems with lookup of Hash keys. While for smaller Hashes the performance issues went away using ruby_2_2 branch, they staid for bigger Hashes. I'll attach a benchmark script (hash_bench_3.rb) I used that creates a Hash with 200000 keys and does a lookup of 10000 of them.

Here my results:

ruby 2.1.6p336 (2015-04-13 revision 50298) [x86_64-darwin14.0]

          string    142.818  (± 2.8%) i/s -    714.000 
          symbol    505.831  (± 3.0%) i/s -      2.550k

ruby 2.2.2p95 (2015-04-13 revision 50295) [x86_64-darwin14]

          string    143.404  (± 3.5%) i/s -    728.000 
          symbol     76.945  (± 6.5%) i/s -    385.000 

ruby 2.2.3p147 (2015-07-04 revision 51143) [x86_64-darwin14] self-compiled

          string    138.349  (± 2.2%) i/s -    702.000 
          symbol     77.495  (± 3.9%) i/s -    392.000 

As you can see 2.2 is much slower than 2.1.6 for symbol keys. I was recommended to disable Garbage Collection for Symbols for testing and did so on the ruby_2_2 branch

ruby 2.2.3p147 (2015-07-04 revision 51143) [x86_64-darwin14] self-compiled, USE_SYMBOL_GC=0

          string    145.179  (± 3.4%) i/s -    728.000 
          symbol    602.008  (± 7.6%) i/s -      3.050k

I would have expected that symbol GC may have some performance impact, but this looks like it is too big. I can't say exactly at which point Garbage Collection really hurts, but the bigger the Hash and the bigger the number of include? calls, the slower it gets.


Files

hash_bench_3.rb (605 Bytes) hash_bench_3.rb brunoe (Bruno Escherl), 07/26/2015 06:16 PM
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