Željko Filipin's Blog on Software and Testing

Today I tried Mikel Lindsaar’s Mail gem on CRuby, JRuby and IronRuby.

Installation of each Ruby version and Mail gem was really easy so I will not describe it here. What interested me was how fast was Mail on each Ruby implementation.

I have created a simple mail and saved it as 1.eml.

Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:37:34 Central European Standard Time
From: from@test.com
To: to@test.com
Message-ID: <4b336e9e762a0_a1014263a4689d3@2003-ie7.mail>
Subject: This is a test email
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="US-ASCII";
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Some text for mail body

This script will read the file, display subject and time elapsed (in seconds).

time = Time.now
require "rubygems"
require "mail"
mail = Mail.read("1.eml")
puts mail.subject.to_s
puts Time.now - time

I have executed the script three times for each Ruby implementation. It looks to me that CRuby and JRuby are similar in speed, and IronRuby is way slower.

Environment

Tests were run in VMware Fusion 2.0.6 virtual machine, 512 MB RAM, Microsoft Windows Sever 2003 R2 (Standard Edition, Service pack 2).
Host machine is MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X 10.6.2, 4 GB RAM.

>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32]

>jruby -v
jruby 1.4.0 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 174) (2009-11-02 69fbfa3) (Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM 1.6.0_10) [x86-java]

>ir -v
IronRuby 0.9.3.0 on .NET 2.0.0.0

Mail version 1.3.4 on all platforms.

Recently I became Watir community manager.

Watir team had a little chat and we decided it would be a good idea to grow. So, one of the first duties I had as community manager was to promote two community members to support sheriffs.

I am glad I can announce that Tiffany Fodor and Wesley Chen have accepted to be added to Watir community team with title of support sheriff.

Tiffany answers a lot of questions and Wesley is helping us moderate the group. I hope both of them will continue with business as usual.

If you have a nice word for them, now is the time.