activerecord benchmarks: how fast is your system?
Courtenay : November 8th, 2007
Over a year ago we published some benchmarks on how fast your computers were running the complete ActiveRecord test suite. I consider this to be a great test for the fastest platform for developing Rails. (Let’s ignore the speed of your IDE or pseudo-IDE—this one’s all about waiting for your autotest. This probably isn’t a good indicator of server status)
It’s time to run this test again. Why? Because I’m buying a new computer, and I want to be the most efficient with my money as possible. That means a macbook, rather than macbook-pro.
Check out Rails revision 8117 (trunk at this time), install sqlite if you haven’t already (macports: rb-sqlite), and run rake test_sqlite
Comment here with your platform, and the time reported. If you want to be more accurate, run it a few times. I’m not a professional statistician; don’t tell Zed Shaw about my shoddy procedure.
Factors that may influence your times: disk speed, processor speed, your ruby version, luck …?
| Who | Hardware | Rake time (sec) | OS |
| |
|
||
| chrissturm | imac core2 | 18.88 | leopard |
| octopod | mbp-sr | 23.45 | tiger |
| technomancy | mbp-sr | 25.74 | ubuntu gutsy |
| defiler | mb1 | 25.772 | leopard |
| form | mb2 2.0 | 26.59 | leopard |
| courtenay | macpro 2×2.6 | 28.49 | tiger |
| mike | Athlon64/3000 | 34.63 | xp |
| courtenay | Sempron64/2600 | 57.49 | fc6 |
| courtenay | powerbook 1.5 | 92.92 | tiger |
- Summary
From the looks of it, most current-level professional macs whether laptop or desktop run the benchmarks at within 15% of the same time. This probably isn’t too much of a surprise, since ActiveRecord won’t run on multiple processors; but it’s nice to know that if you’re only really doing rails on your laptop, a macbook is as good as anything out there.
The move to Intel has really helped Apple get a nice standard baseline for performance, that clearly smokes the ‘old’ PPCs.
In fact, ‘ol faithful, my previous fast-rails-box running linux on an amd-64, has dropped to very lowly status of 57 seconds. It’s time to retire my trusty powerbook. I spend more time waiting than coding.
Notes:
- mb1 : MacBook 1 (Core Duo)
- mb2 : MacBook 2 (Core 2 Duo)
- mb3 : MacBook 3 (Santa Rosa)
- mbp-sr : MacBookPro (Santa Rosa)
9 Responses to “activerecord benchmarks: how fast is your system?”
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November 8th, 2007 at 12:25 PM
25.74s on my work machine: a MBP Santa Rosa (latest rev; LED screen) running Ubuntu Gutsy. I do get one failure; not sure how that affects the speed. I've also got a much slower disk than my personal thinkpad; would be interested in seeing the numbers there.
November 8th, 2007 at 01:03 PM
The first run took 24.826923 seconds but complained about mocha gem not installed. After installing mocha it took 25.452933 seconds. This is on my Fujitsu Siemens S7110 with Core Duo 2GHz and 1GB DDR2 on Ubuntu Gutsy.
November 8th, 2007 at 01:59 PM
Debian Lenny on an AMD X2 BE-2300 1.9GHz with 940MB RAM: 32.05s
That was the sqlite3 tests, not sqlite btw.
November 8th, 2007 at 07:20 PM
15.449 seconds on my Mac Pro with Leopard 1.8.6-p110 built from source without pthreads enabled.
November 9th, 2007 at 05:58 AM
iMac (alluminium) Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GHz with 2GB RAM: 17.60s
November 9th, 2007 at 08:24 AM
I had tried two different setups on the same machine.
The machine: Mac Pro 2x3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon on Leopard with 4GB of RAM.
The first tests had trunk running on a slow 5400 RPM external Firewire drive. The second ran on a 4 disk striped array on 7200 RPM drives with huge buffers.
Times: 16.4 seconds on the external drive 7.2 seconds on the RAID
I suppose this makes sense, though more than doubling the speed is interesting.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:02 AM
Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, Samsung HD160HJ, Gentoo/Linux, ruby 1.8.6 patchlevel 111 (without pthreads):
test_sqlite: 33.8 seconds test_sqlite3: 39.9 seconds
Harddisk writes upto 8.7 MB/sec during the tests (5 seconds average).
November 10th, 2007 at 01:08 PM
MacBook Pro, 2.33 GHz Core Duo 2 Ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) Rails r8124
SQLite versions: sqlite -version => 2.8.17 sqlite3 -version => 3.5.2
gem versions: sqlite-ruby (2.2.3) sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1)
results: rake test_sqlite: 20.7s rake test_sqlite3: 23.5s
November 17th, 2007 at 03:28 PM
My T61 2GHz with 1G of RAM and the 100G 7200rpm disk takes 34.77 seconds to complete 'rake test_sqlite3'. It's essentially a MBP hardware-wise (Santa Rosa chipset), and I'm running Kubuntu Gutsy. I ran the test in a bare console (without X running) and got about the same time.
Ruby 1.8.6 sqlite3-ruby 1.2.1
I'll try recompiling Ruby, and I'm about to add another 1G of RAM which will speed up RAM access by enabling dual-channel goodness. I'll report again if I see a change.