activerecord 2.3.5's create & find slower than activerecord 2.1.2?

rubyonrails-core
1

[I posted this on rubyonrails-talk, but it was suggested I post it here as well. I apologize for the cross-post.]

Can anyone help me understand what's going on here? We updated one of our apps from 2.1.2 to 2.3.5 hoping largely to get a little performance boost since I know there was a lot of performance improvements in the 2.3.x line. However we discovered instead that our test suite is now running around 40% slower. Looking around on line we found some reports of slowness with the built-in memcache client, but we're not using it. So we started reducing code looking for the performance differences and eventually arrived at what appears to be around a 35% slowdown in AR::B.find & around a 20% slowdown in AR::B.create.

To test this we created to bare rails apps, one 2.1.2 the other 2.3.5. Both were set to use mysql for the database:

$ rails-2.1.2 bench212 -d mysql $ rails-2.3.5 bench235 -d mysql

Then we run this in each $ ./script/generate model Foo $ rake db:create $ rake db:migrate

Then drop this ( http://gist.github.com/277319 ) in the script directory of each. The results are pretty consistently thus:

Rails 2.3.5 25000 finds (7330.0ms) (7.33) 25000 creates (32942.4ms) (32.942)

Rails 2.1.2 25000 finds (5.37473) 25000 creates (26.60233)

Looking at the profile trees, the only one difference that stands out is in 2.3.5, 3.11% of the time is spent in ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionHandler#retrieve_connection_pool which doesn't appear in 2.1.2.

We've tried this on two different machines (one mac running macport installed ruby, the other an x86-64 ubuntu box running stock ruby 1.8) and see similar results on each. Is this slowdown expected? Or is there something flawed in our benchmarks?

Thanks!

Ben

2

Looking at the profile trees, the only one difference that stands out is in 2.3.5, 3.11% of the time is spent in ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionHandler#retrieve_connection_poo l which doesn't appear in 2.1.2.

that's not 40% worth...what else is different speed-wise/profile wise? -r

3

Looking at the profile trees, the only one difference that stands out is in 2.3.5, 3.11% of the time is spent in ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionHandler#retrieve_connection_poo l which doesn't appear in 2.1.2.

I played around with git bisect and it would seem that the move to connection pools is what slows down your benchmark.

Fred

4

I played around with git bisect and it would seem that the move to connection pools is what slows down your benchmark.

Does it still cause the slow down if you explicitly turn off the pooling in database.yml? e.g. pool: 1

5

Turning off pooling does indeed reduce the slow down. It brings AR::B.create right back in line with 2.1.2 & find is now just ~9% slower. So that does explain most of what we're seeing in this benchmark. Thanks for the suggestion!

-Ben

6

Out of interest, how does 3.0 perform?