Tim Groeneveld

A good friend of mine, Jordan Bracco recently forced me to rediscover Ruby on Rails. He told me that the new version, 1.9 is “5000x faster”, so I thought, well, why not!

The last version of Ruby I tried was either version 1.7 or 1.8, and it was not really something that I would say rocked my boat. It was slow, and just plain did not do (at that time what I though) I wanted.

Me being a version freak – and a speed freak, decided that I would go to the Ruby, check out their CVS repository out (seriously, these guys need to update to mercurial, just like Mozilla has!) and compiled Ruby’s latest trunk version.

The speed speaks for it’s self. A basic “Hello World” Ruby on Rails app does 700 requests a second, while a basic “Hello World” in PHP does 800. For this use case, yes, PHP is faster, but what you have to remember is that Ruby on Rails is much, much, much more sophisticated in terms of functionality.

I recently rewrote a page that is on ShareSource.org, and it is almost twice as fast. The difference here, is that the Ruby rewrite had no cache. Every single hit with Apache benchmark was generated on demand, while the PHP version of the ShareSource.org page in question was kept in cache for five minutes.

Aaaahhh, I am loving Ruby already.

Ever wanted to run your own bank? Well, my new [experimental] web application allows you to do exactly that. While some may say that I just have way too much time on my hands, others might just say that I should get top marks for my IPT [Information Processing Technology] assignment.

We had to build a database system, which implemented relational databases, and I thought, well, I could make my very own banking software, and fulfil one of my many dreams: to run my own bank.

The software, written in PHP was a testing ground for many new things that I have wanted to go and try, but never really had a project to try them out on.

I must say that MyBanco would have to be the first application that I have written with the mindset of handling around 700 transactions every second.

MyBanco uses a backend for it’s database which I have dubbed ‘MyInfo’. MyInfo is a JSON-RPC like protocol, which is easy to use, and can send multiple packets (I just thought then it might have been better to call these chunks… hmmmm) all at once, and get a response from all those packets. Think of it as a easy to read and faster to pharse version of XML-RPC.

I will chat at MyBanco a little more later, when the time is right, but for the moment this post will do

(hope you like the new blog!)