Ruby HTTP Client Performance

Courtesy of Ruby Inside there is a pretty interesting analysis of Ruby 1.8.x client performance

Ruby’s Net::HTTP implementation blows. It’s a bit better in 1.8.7 with the new 16K buffer size, but the timeout implementation has got to go. Even with timeout eliminated, Net::HTTP is trounced by the pure-Ruby rfuzz and the native/Ruby blend curb, suggesting that timeout notwithstanding, there are other inefficiencies in Net::HTTP. Looking at the protocol.rb code, I’m struck by how painfully inefficient the implementation is with buffers. rfuzz and curb minimize buffer copies and my rfuzz streaming HTTP extension reuses the same buffer for multiple calls, while Net::HTTP is happily appending and sliceing away at arrays.