[AVRO-1260] Ruby: Performance improvements for parsing

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.7.3
• Fix Version/s: 1.7.5
• Component/s: ruby
• Assignee: Martin Kleppmann
• Reporter: Martin Kleppmann
• Created: 20/Feb/13 01:38
• Updated: 20/Aug/13 17:46
• Resolved: 01/Mar/13 19:03

Description

I've made a few performance improvements to the Ruby Avro decoder. In my tests (decoding a complex record with many fields and nested records), I saw a 40% speedup on MRI 1.8.7 and a 20% speedup on MRI 1.9.3. The improved code also makes about half as many object allocations as before.

Main changes are:

• Using symbols instead of strings for the various schema types (there was actually a FIXME in the code for this, now fixed)
• Added a few memoizations to avoid unnecessarily recomputing values

I've tried to keep the API unchanged — Avro::Schema#type still returns a string, as users may be relying on the type (Avro::Schema#type_sym has the symbolized version). So I don't think this patch introduces any compatibility problems (as long as apps aren't relying on internals of the Avro library).