Josh recently added Rails Metal, which has been getting a fair bit of publicity. Metal is a great piece of functionality for those rare cases where the speed of your framework actually matters.

However, people have been reporting 25x speed increase over a regular Rails action, and that just doesn’t seem right. So I decided to do some benchmarking of ‘Hello World’ Rails action v/s Metal. Here are my results :

Rails action

Time per request : 1.244 [ms]

Throughput : 800 request/second

Metal

Time per request : 0.386 [ms]

Throughput : 3000 request/second

You can find more details about benchmark command/code at http://gist.github.com/38080

Of course, these are not very scientific benchmarks and your results may vary a little from what you see here. You should also make sure you run your benchmarks in production mode.

Now, if you compare these results, 3000 r/s against 800 r/s, you may think you’re seeing a 3x performance increase. However, that’d a wrong perception and throughput isn’t the best metric here.

Difference in Time per request is what you should looking at. In my benchmarks, speed increase I get when using Metal is about 1 millisecond. And that’s a constant speed increase I’ll get over a regular Rails action. It’s very important to understand that it’s a constant speed increase. It’ll always be 1 ms for me.

For example, if my Rails action takes 12ms, when I reimplement it all in Metal, it will take about 11 ms and not 4 ms.

To conclude, I’ll just quote DHH :