Comments on: Making ActiveResource 34x faster: QActiveResource

By: Gitfeed, Git to RSS and the growing collection of small hacks at Scott Wheeler

Gitfeed, Git to RSS and the growing collection of small hacks at Scott Wheeler — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:35:04 +0000

[...] for reading data — basically a C++ implementation of the find method. Details in the company blog, or naturally on [...]

By: Vito Botta

Vito Botta — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:22:31 +0000

Thanks for the speedy reply Scott – will definitely keep an eye on QAR

By: Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:01:23 +0000

It’s quite similar in spirit to MonkeySupport, though attacking another part of the Rails stack. Honestly, I think Rails is grown up enough at this point that it’d make sense for it to have C implementations of a lot of its hot points stuff and for them to not be outcasts in the project.

By: Svoop

Svoop — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:50:29 +0000

How does this compare to MonkeySupport?

http://www.railsinside.com/misc/315-monkeysupport-boosting-rails-with-patches-of-c.html

By: Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:41:33 +0000

Hey Vito –

At the moment QAR just does XML parsing (since that’s where the use case was for us — consuming AR APIs that we don’t have control of). Some of the speedup is in object creation and using libcurl instead of Ruby’s network stack, which you would get even with a JSON consumer, but a lot of the speedup is in XML parsing as well, so how much of a speedup you’d get there really depends on how bad Ruby’s JSON parsers are.

In principle it wouldn’t be hard to extend QAR to JSON. Just the reader function would need to be replaced and the fetch function would need to be made a little smarter to decide which format to use.

By: Vito Botta

Vito Botta — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:28:36 +0000

Hi Scott,

those figures look stunning! I am working on both an API and a couple of client applications which make heavy use of ActiveResource to communicate with each other.

However, I am using JSON as serialisation format rather than XML. Would QAR work using JSON? And, if yes, would I still see that huge performance boost?

Thanks!

By: Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:01:10 +0000

Hey Cody – nope, this wasn’t with gzip, but the profiling was with files served from localhost, so I’d assume it’d only slow them down? Honestly I don’t know how to force AR to use gzip/zlib, but it’s easy enough from libcurl.

By: Cody Fauser

Cody Fauser — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:21:22 +0000

Scott,

Looks impessive! Are you taking advantage of gzip compression as well? I found that this reduces the size of API responses significantly. Fetching 250 products with Accept-Encoding: gzip is 7.5% of the size of the non-gzipped response.

By: Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:51:36 +0000

@edward – The GitHub links are in the post.

By: Edward Ocampo-Gooding

Edward Ocampo-Gooding — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:34:25 +0000

Oh wow! Nice work Scott.

Any plans to open source this code?