How to Benchmark Ruby Code

July 11, 2021 • ruby

The Benchmark module in the Ruby standard library allows you to measure the performance of your Ruby code. It provides the following methods to measure and report the time.

measure

require 'benchmark'

puts Benchmark.measure { 1_00_000 * 45 }

# 0.000009   0.000008   0.000017 (  0.000006)

The output indicates the user CPU time, system CPU time, total time, and the elapsed real time in seconds.

bm

Use this method to compare various operations sequentially.

require 'benchmark'

n = 5_000_000
Benchmark.bm(5) do |x|
  x.report("for") { for i in 1..n; a = "1"; end }
  x.report("times") { n.times do   ; a = "1"; end }
  x.report("upto") { 1.upto(n) do ; a = "1"; end }
end

#            user     system      total        real
# for     0.309944   0.001038   0.310982 (  0.311954)
# times   0.323748   0.004644   0.328392 (  0.336111)
# upto    0.332247   0.001191   0.333438 (  0.335128)

bmbm

This method performs a rehearsal before the real benchmarking starts to eliminate the costs associated with the memory allocation and garbage collection. Here’s an example from the ‘Programming Ruby’ book. I’ve refactored it slightly.

require 'Benchmark'

DICT = "/usr/share/dict/words"

def read_all
  str = File.read(DICT)
  words = str.scan(/[-\w']+/)
end

def read_lines
  words = []
  File.foreach(DICT) do |line|
    words << line.chomp
  end
end

Benchmark.bmbm(6) do |x|
  x.report("all") { read_all }
  x.report("lines") { read_lines }
end

# Rehearsal ------------------------------------------
# all      0.063806   0.005232   0.069038 (  0.069187)
# lines    0.065963   0.003346   0.069309 (  0.069376)
# --------------------------------- total: 0.138347sec
#
# user     system      total        real
# all      0.048083   0.000751   0.048834 (  0.048901)
# lines    0.075965   0.002674   0.078639 (  0.078782)