Robot Has No Heart

I noticed a number of my unit tests were taking upwards of 10ms, an order of magnitude slower than they should be. Turns out I was abusing rspec doubles, in particular I was using one instead of a value object. Doubles are far slower than plain Ruby objects, in particular as the number of attributes goes up. It looks linear, but the constant factor is bad. The following benchmark demonstrates using a double versus an OpenStruct, which can often be used as a drop in replacement. (Normally I just use the value object itself, but it this case it was an ActiveRecord subclass.)

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require 'ostruct'

describe 'benchmark' do
  let(:attributes) {
    ENV['N'].to_i.times.each_with_object({}) {|x, h| h["attr_#{x}"] = 'hello' }
  }

  5.times do
    it 'measures doubles' do
      double(attributes)
    end

    it 'measures structs' do
      OpenStruct.new(attributes)
    end
  end
end

Only 6-8 attributes before the 1ms barrier is broken, and this is only for construction!

To graph it, I threw out the first result for each measurement, since it tended to be all over the shop during warm up. The following script is a hack that relies on a priori knowledge that double is slower, since it doesn’t try to match rspec profile out measurements to label. The measurements are so different in this case that it works.

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> for N in {1..20}; do env N=$N rspec benchmark_spec.rb -p | \
  grep seconds | \
  grep benchmark_spec | \
  awk '{print $1}' | \
  xargs echo $N; done > results.dat

> gnuplot << eor
set terminal jpeg size 600,200 font "arial,9"
set key left
set output 'graph.jpg'
set datafile separator " "
set xlabel '# of attributes'
set ylabel 'construction time (s)'
plot 'results.dat' u 1:( (\$3+\$4+\$5+\$6)/4) with lines title 'Double', \
       '' u 1:( (\$8+\$9+\$10+\$11) / 4) with lines title 'Struct'
eor

My next project: what is the best way to get the elevated guarantees provided by rspec-fire without taking the speed hit?