Toronto Rails Night - Merb Presentation

11 June, 2008

Last night was yet another successful Toronto Ruby on Rails Nite put on by Corina Newby. The Toronto ruby community is rocking, evidenced by the large turnouts and fresh faces we see everytime. I'd guess 40-50 of Toronto's best and brightest Rails developers filled out the room. The unspace guys put on some much appreciated beer and made sure we're all informed about the upcoming RubyFringe (can't wait, I'm really hoping Zed's presentation is as exciting as his blog rants posts). Along with the other presenters of the night Mike and Libin/Wes/Carsten (up on TorontoRB.ca sometime in the next day or so). I did a presentation on Merb - The pocket rocket framework. Slides are are here (you may have to click through to the blog post to view if you're reading this in a reader/aggregator). Resource links are at the end of this post, and some discussion notes follow.. Presentation background Intended for people who are interested in looking at Merb, collating key points from blog posts, irc dicussions, mailing lists, and own experiences getting an app running with Merb (well the opposite way round, trying to get an app running and finding out those answers!). Hopefully the presentation collected a fair few hours worth of investigation into 20 or so minutes to help other people out Sports Bikes vs Sports Cars Useful analogy between Sports Bikes (Merb) and Sports Cars (Rails). Said cars have all the bells and whistles, everything is packaged up nicely, and it's pretty hard to hurt yourself, however given the nice packaging it's pretty hard to modify things. Sports bikes (Merb) on the other hand, are much more open to tuning, playing with, go faster, but need a bit more care Same same but different Rails and Merb apps are very much of the same likeness, but there are differences. Don't expect to be able to port code over 1:1 (especially if you've got a big reliance on plugins), and don't pepper the merb mailing lists/irc channel for "please make xyx behave like it is in rails merb-core & merb-more Two gems you need to get started (technically you only need merb-core). -Core is the stripped down bare minimum to get merb running. -more contains all the nice packaged goods to help you along the way merb-gen is your friend throw out script/* you're now doing everything in merb gen for generating your app, models, resources etc Key code differences refer to slides, but the code used is difference Agnostic in a very good way Merb is agnostic when it comes to ORM, test framework, js framework, rack adapator. merb-gen behaviour changes based on component used so if you're using rpsec, then stories get created vs unit tests. This is one of the reasons I'm very much into the idea of Merb Cool features part controllers, action args, router, covered off in the slides. Full apps, flat apps, very flat apps and thin servers and large grains of salt For performance stats (which are to be taken with a very large grain of salt). Hello world action on a single controller, rails would be about 300 req/s full merb app would be round 500 req/s flat merb app 500-550 req/s, a very flat app marginally quicker again, front a very flat app with thin (merb -I veryflatapp.rb -p 3000 -e production -a thin) and woah hold on, 1000 req/s ! Question was asked about benchmark figures and I made the point, they're going to be all over the place - it's easy enough to benchmark for yourself, that's the only thing that's really relevant. We know Merb is quick, just how quick will depend on your own application and uses. Merb, Rails and you The inevitable discussion at the end around, should you use Merb and how does it relate to Rails. Some of the goodness in Merb looks to be slowly being backported to Rails, so over time Rails will benefit from all of the wizardry going on in Merb (hopefully!). For those that like Merb's approach, and willing to forsake the vast library of rails plugins, and/or have very specific performance requirements and/or need to hack a framework around to do what they want. Merb looks to be killer. Ultimately it's upto you, so evaluate carefully. Resources Lots of link goodness..... http://merbivore.com http://wiki.merbivore.com http://merbunity.com http://merborials.com/ http://groups.google.com/group/merb http://github.com/search?q=merb http://mwrc2008.confreaks.com/ http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=merb http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=datamapper

Read More

Rails vs Merb & ActiveRecord/Datamapper

19 February, 2008

If you're getting to this page from searching "Rails vs Merb" I suggest you read/view this presentation I did http://work.rowanhick.com/2008/06/11/toronto-rails-night-merb-presentation/ Following on from my presentation last week, I had someone mention I should look at Merb+Datamapper if I'm looking for something awesomely fast. So I decided to put it to the test. This is a *completely* contrived - I've done enough benchmarking to know this, so take the following figures with an (extremely) large grain of salt, I'm just posting this for interest. The view being rendered is a real world view that I'm using for a rewrite of a PHP/MySQL app, listing out orders by order status, along with their customer and originating country. I've got a database of Orders(770), OrderStatuses(17), Customers(300), Countries(244). I have a find by sql statement I'm using to pull upto 100 orders like so: "SELECT orders.id, orders.created_at, customers.name as customer_name, countries.name as country_name, order_statuses.name as status_name FROM orders LEFT OUTER JOIN `customers` ON `customers`.id = `orders`.customer_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `countries` ON `countries`.id = `customers`.country_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `order_statuses` ON `order_statuses`.id = `orders`.order_status_id WHERE (order_status_id < 100) ORDER BY order_statuses.sort_order ASC,order_statuses.id ASC, orders.id DESC LIMIT 100" The same statement is used in all 3 applications, along with the same generated html. All 3 apps were run daemonized in production mode using mongrel. The resulting page is comprised of a layout + js + css files, that each app is serving identically. Using Rails: 42.16 req/s (baseline) Using Merb + ActiveRecord: 57.80 req/s (1.37x) Using Merb + Datamapper: 72.98 req/s (1.73x) So lets up the order count to 11550. As the volumes of data goes up (and therefore database tuning becomes more important) these are the following figures... Using Rails: 22.82 req/s (baseline) Using Merb + ActiveRecord: 29.85 req/s (1.30x) Using Merb + Datamapper: 33.91 req/s (1.48x) Merb+Datamapper still outshines the competition, but the difference in performance isn't quite as significant, however once the DB is tuned, I bet life gets more interesting.... Again before I get lambasted, take the figures with a grain of salt, the times do vary quite significantly as there are variables aplenty, just look at the general trends.

Read More