This blog post is update of my recent Ruby Mail on CRuby, JRuby and IronRuby post. Mikel and Jimmy have commented on the post saying I did a poor job, and I would agree. I decided to do a better job this time. Please let me know if measurements can be further improved.

So, I have an e-mail file called 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

The First Try

This is the test from the first post. (RubyInstaller was not included in the first post.) It is included here so all code and numbers are at the same page, I guess it is easier to compare that way. Read the file, display subject and total 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

Executed the script three times for each Ruby implementation. RubyInstaller the fastest, CRuby and JRuby were similar in speed, IronRuby was way slower.

The Second Try

Since both Mikel and Jimmy said require could take the majority of the time, and I was not really interested in measuring that, I excluded it from the measurement.

require "rubygems"
require "mail"

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

Times were way shorter. RubyInstaller the fastest (can not get much faster that 0.0 seconds), CRuby and JRuby in the same order of magnitude, IronRuby order of magnitude slower. JRuby has surprisingly the same numbers every time.

Benchmark

Mikel and Jimmy have suggested that I should use benchmark.rb, so I took a look. I have slightly modified the script. This time the file was read 1000 times.

require "rubygems"
require "mail"
require "benchmark"

Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report { 1000.times do; puts Mail.read("1.eml").subject.to_s; end }
end

This measurement said JRuby was the fastest, followed closely by RubyInstaller and CRuby, IronRuby again order of magnitude 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

>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2009-08-04 patchlevel 383) [i386-mingw32]

Mail version 1.3.4 on all platforms.

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.

The second Ruby on Beers happened yesterday. About 15 of us appeared, much more than I expected.

We were talking about Heroku, Git and Watir.

We did not have the time to talk about Unicode and RSpec, so we will talk about it the next time. There was interest in talking about Rubinius.

The next Ruby on Beers will probably happen at the same place (Multimedijalni institut, net.kulturni klub mama, Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb), at Saturday May 31st 2008 at 5 pm.

The first Ruby on Beers meeting happened last Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at lake Jarun, Zagreb, Croatia (map).

Ruby on Beers is informal gathering of Ruby users. It all started at ruby-hr Google group (in Croatian) that came to life after the first BarCamp Zagreb where we realized that there are more than one Ruby user in the near (as I thought before Barcamp).

The four of us appeared. Branimir Šloser, Saša Branković, Mislav Marohnić and me.

We enjoyed excellent Tomislav beer and discussed the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and more specifically, what to do next.

The next meeting should be on Saturday, May 10th, 2008. I hope I will be able to talk about Watir, and there are rumors that there will be something said about Git and Unicode. Only the time will tell.

More details at Ruby on Beers official page.

If you are in the near, please drop by.

I have been using TMail for testing e-mail functionality of web application that I test for a long time. But, development of that library stopped at 2004. Today I found out that it is again in development. Take a look at it’s web site and RubyForge project site.

Long long time ago, I was reviewer of Brian Marick’s Everyday Scripting with Ruby. On February 2, 2007 Pragmatic Programmers said they would send me a free copy, but it did not arrive for a long time. I exchanged a few e-mails with them, and today the book arrived. I did not even have time to unwrap it yet.

module Application
class File
def delete
end
end
class Mail
def self.download
File.delete “mail.eml”
end
end
end

Application::Mail.download

Run this code and you will get error message:

Exception: undefined method `delete' for Application::File:Class

I could rename Application::File to something else, but I created Application module because I wanted to name my classes as I wish without conflicts with Ruby classes.

One solution is to specify that I want to call IO::File.delete.

def self.download
IO::File.delete “mail.eml”
end

But then I get this warning:

warning: toplevel constant File referenced by IO::File

How to ignore warning thread at ruby-forum.com provided the solution to removing warning. Add this at the beginning of the file:

$VERBOSE = nil

But, I want to see other warnings. I know I can change the value of $VERBOSE to nil just before I call IO::File.delete and then change it back. That just feels wrong. Why am I getting that warning after all? Why do I get the warning after calling IO::File.delete? Am I doing something wrong?

Here is the latest one.

File.copy(from, to)

should work. But, I got this error message:

NoMethodError: undefined method `copy' for File:Class

Google search led me to ruby-talk post that said I should do:

require “ftools”

I am just surprised that documentation did not make that clear.