This change implements a cache for class variables. Previously there was no cache for cvars. Cvar access is slow due to needing to travel all the way up th ancestor tree before returning the cvar value. The deeper the ancestor tree the slower cvar access will be.
The benefits of the cache are more visible with a higher number of included modules due to the way Ruby looks up class variables. The benchmark here includes 26 modules and shows with the cache, this branch is 6.5x faster when accessing class variables.
Benchmark.ips calling ActiveRecord::Base.logger from within a Rails application. ActiveRecord::Base.logger has 71 ancestors. The more ancestors a tree has, the more clear the speed increase. IE if Base had only one ancestor we'd see no improvement. This benchmark is run on a vanilla Rails application.
Warming up -------------------------------------- logger 155.251k i/100ms Calculating -------------------------------------
Ruby 3.0 with cvar cache / Rails 6.1:
Warming up -------------------------------------- logger 1.546M i/100ms Calculating ------------------------------------- logger 14.857M (± 4.8%) i/s - 74.198M in 5.006202s
Lastly we ran a benchmark to demonstate the difference between master and our cache when the number of modules increases. This benchmark measures 1 ancestor, 30 ancestors, and 100 ancestors.
Add a cache for class variables
Redo of 34a2acdac788602c14bf05fb616215187badd504 and
931138b00696419945dc03e10f033b1f53cd50f3 which were reverted.
GitHub PR #4340.
This change implements a cache for class variables. Previously there was
no cache for cvars. Cvar access is slow due to needing to travel all the
way up th ancestor tree before returning the cvar value. The deeper the
ancestor tree the slower cvar access will be.
The benefits of the cache are more visible with a higher number of
included modules due to the way Ruby looks up class variables. The
benchmark here includes 26 modules and shows with the cache, this branch
is 6.5x faster when accessing class variables.
Benchmark.ips calling
ActiveRecord::Base.loggerfrom within a Railsapplication. ActiveRecord::Base.logger has 71 ancestors. The more
ancestors a tree has, the more clear the speed increase. IE if Base had
only one ancestor we'd see no improvement. This benchmark is run on a
vanilla Rails application.
Benchmark code:
Ruby 3.0 master / Rails 6.1:
Ruby 3.0 with cvar cache / Rails 6.1:
Lastly we ran a benchmark to demonstate the difference between master
and our cache when the number of modules increases. This benchmark
measures 1 ancestor, 30 ancestors, and 100 ancestors.
Ruby 3.0 master:
Ruby 3.0 with cvar cache:
Co-authored-by: Aaron Patterson tenderlove@ruby-lang.org