Benchmarking JRuby

The current popular way to benchmark JRuby performance is to perform a gem installation of Rake. The install process exercises a number of APIs and represents a fairly general-purpose application of Ruby. It's also extremely interpreter-heavy.

After getting a build of JRuby, as above, the following steps can be used to benchmark JRuby using Gem and Rake:

• Fetch the current Rake gem from RubyForge
• Execute the following command (putting JRUBY_HOME/bin in your path or referencing it directly):

 JRUBY_HOME/bin/gem install <rake gem file>

• By preceding this command line with the unix "time" command you can test end-to-end performance. Of course there are other ways to wire in profiling and performance-monitoring tools that won't be detailed here.

A sample run from a MacBook Pro under Apple's Java 6 JVM is shown below:

 Nutters-Computer:~/Documents/workspace/jruby headius$ time bin/gem install rake-0.7.1.gem 
 Successfully installed rake, version 0.7.1
 Installing ri documentation for rake-0.7.1...
 Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.7.1...
 
 real    0m52.596s
 user    0m51.740s
 sys     0m2.146s