Category: Ruby Programming

Covered In This Episode:

• What is benchmarking?
• Benchmarking
• Profiling

Transcript:

Hello Everybody and welcome to Programming With Ruby Episode 16,
Benchmarking. I’m Tyler and this video is brought to you by
manwithcode.com.

In this episode I will tell you what benchmarking is. You will learn
how to preform benchmarking tests on some of your code. And after that
you will learn how to preform the more exhaustive benchmarking process
called profiling.

This should be a very quick and easy episode, so lets get started!

What is benchmarking?

Basically benchmarking is measuring how fast your code runs. Whether
that means your code as a whole or only parts of it. This can be
useful so you can optimize your code to run faster, in the places it
is running the slowest. Benchmarking is also commonly used to compare
two different programs in the category of speed, which can be a
selling point for many products.

Benchmarking

To get access to benchmarking make sure you put:

require 'benchmark'

in your code.

The most simple form of benchmarking is Benchmark.measure:

a = Benchmark.measure do
    1_000_000.times do |i|
        x = i
    end
end

puts a #=> 0.400000   0.140000   0.540000 (  0.537934)

The last number is the actual time it took to run the test.

There is also Benchmark.bm, which is similar, but adds headings and
allows you to do multiple tests.

Benchmark.bm do |bm|
    bm.report('Test 1:') do
        1_000_000.times do
            x = 1
        end
    end
    bm.report('Test 2:') do
        1_000.times do
            x = "Moo..."
        end
    end
end

# Example Output:
#          user     system      total        real
# Test 1:  0.430000   0.120000   0.550000 (  0.563787)
# Test 2:  0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000775)

Then there is Benchmark.bmbm, which is exactly the same as bm, but
preforms a benchmark twice.

Example Benchmark.bmbm Output:
Rehearsal -------------------------------------------
Test 1:   0.370000   0.110000   0.480000 (  0.484865)
Test 2:   0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000529)
---------------------------------- total: 0.480000sec

user     system      total        real
Test 1:   0.390000   0.090000   0.480000 (  0.477402)
Test 2:   0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000529)

And that is all there is to know about simple benchmarking, on to
profiling.

Profiling

Profiling takes benchmarking to the extreme. It tells you how much time each part of your code is take, and all you have to do is put:

require 'profile'

at the top of your program!

require 'profile'

class MyMath
    # Don't worry about the math, just the profiling output
    # We repeat the code to make it use up more time
    def self.x_offset angle, distance
        1000.times { distance * Math.sin(angle * Math::PI/180) }
    end

    def self.y_offset angle, distance
        1000.times { distance * Math.cos(angle * Math::PI/180) * -1 }
    end
end

MyMath.x_offset(220, 50)
MyMath.y_offset(220, 50)

And from the profiling output, we can see what took the longest:

%   cumulative   self              self     total
time   seconds   seconds    calls  ms/call  ms/call  name
72.41     0.21      0.21        2   105.00   145.00  Integer#times
10.34     0.24      0.03     4000     0.01     0.01  Fixnum#*
6.90     0.26      0.02     1000     0.02     0.02  Math.cos
6.90     0.28      0.02     2000     0.01     0.01  Float#/
3.45     0.29      0.01     1000     0.01     0.01  Float#*
0.00     0.29      0.00        1     0.00   140.00  MyMath#y_offset
0.00     0.29      0.00        1     0.00   150.00  MyMath#x_offset
0.00     0.29      0.00        1     0.00     0.00  Class#inherited
0.00     0.29      0.00     1000     0.00     0.00  Math.sin
0.00     0.29      0.00        2     0.00     0.00  Kernel.singleton_method_added
0.00     0.29      0.00        1     0.00   290.00  #toplevel

And that is it for today’s episode!

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If you have any thing to say about anything related to Man With Code
or these videos, please leave a comment below, or email me at
tyler@manwithcode.com

Thanks for watching, Bye!