FasterPath

The primary GOAL of this project is to improve performance in the most heavily used areas of Ruby as path relation and file lookup is currently a huge bottleneck in performance. As this is the case the path performance updates will likely not be limited to just changing the Pathname class but also will be offering changes in related methods and classes.

Users will have the option to write their apps directly for this library, or they can choose to either refine or monkeypatch the existing standard library. Refinements are narrowed to scope and monkeypatching will be a sledge hammer ;-)

NOTE: Refinements and monkeypatch methods are highly likely to be changed and renamed pre version 0.1.0 so keep that in mind!

Why

I did a check on Rails on what methods were being called the most and where the application spend most of its time. It turns out roughly 80% (as far as I can tell) of the time spent and calls made are file Path handling. This is shocking, but it only gets worse when handling assets. That is why we need to deal with these load heavy methods in the most efficient manner!

Here's a snippet of a Rails stack profile with some of the most used and time expensive methods.

Booting: development
Endpoint: "/"
       user     system      total        real
100 requests 26.830000   1.780000  28.610000 ( 28.866952)
Running `stackprof tmp/2016-06-09T00:42:10-04:00-stackprof-cpu-myapp.dump`. Execute `stackprof --help` for more info
==================================
  Mode: cpu(1000)
  Samples: 7184 (0.03% miss rate)
  GC: 1013 (14.10%)
==================================
     TOTAL    (pct)     SAMPLES    (pct)     FRAME
      1894  (26.4%)        1894  (26.4%)     Pathname#chop_basename
      1466  (20.4%)         305   (4.2%)     Pathname#plus
      1628  (22.7%)         162   (2.3%)     Pathname#+
       234   (3.3%)         117   (1.6%)     ActionView::PathResolver#find_template_paths
      2454  (34.2%)          62   (0.9%)     Pathname#join
        57   (0.8%)          52   (0.7%)     ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker#watched
       760  (10.6%)          47   (0.7%)     Pathname#relative?
       131   (1.8%)          25   (0.3%)     ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker#max_mtime
        88   (1.2%)          21   (0.3%)     Sprockets::Asset#dependency_fresh?
        18   (0.3%)          18   (0.3%)     ActionView::Helpers::AssetUrlHelper#compute_asset_extname
       108   (1.5%)          14   (0.2%)     ActionView::Helpers::AssetUrlHelper#asset_path

Status

Rust compilation is working
Methods are most likely stable
Testers and developers are most welcome!

Installation

Ensure Rust is installed:

Rust Downloads

curl -sSf https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sudo sh -s -- --channel=nightly

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'faster_path'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install faster_path

Usage

Current methods implemented:

FasterPath Rust Implementation	Ruby 2.3.1 Implementation	Performance Improvement
`FasterPath.absolute?`	`Pathname#absolute?`	1234.6%
`FasterPath.chop_basename`	`Pathname#chop_basename`	27.5%
`FasterPath.blank?`

You may choose to use the methods directly, or scope change to rewrite behavior on the standard library with the included refinements, or even call a method to monkeypatch everything everywhere.

Note: Pathname#chop_basename in Ruby STDLIB has a bug with blank strings, that is the only difference in behavior against FasterPath's implementation.

For the scoped refinements you will need to

require "faster_path/optional/refinements"
using FasterPath::RefinePathname

And for the sledgehammer of monkey patching you can do

require "faster_path/optional/monkeypatching"
FasterPath.sledgehammer_everything!

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/danielpclark/faster_path.

License

MIT License or APACHE 2.0 at your pleasure.

samgranieri / faster_path