Code Like Zell
Benchmarking Ruby Time and Date instantiation
Posted 19 October 2007.
A comparison of various ways to represent dates and times in ruby. I am creating October 10, 2007 in every case, here are the tests:
n=10000
Benchmark.bm(10) do |test|
test.report("Date.strptime: ") do
n.times {Date.strptime("20071001","%Y%m%d")}
end
test.report("Date.parse: ") do
n.times {Date.parse("20071001")}
end
test.report("Time.now: ") do
n.times {Time.now}
end
test.report("Date.new: ") do
n.times {Date.new(2007, 10, 1)}
end
test.report("DateTime.civil: ") do
n.times {DateTime.civil(2007, 10, 1)}
end
test.report("DateTime.parse: ") do
n.times {DateTime.parse("20071001")}
end
test.report("DateTime.strptime: ") do
n.times {DateTime.strptime("20071001","%Y%m%d")}
end
test.report("Time.local: ") do
n.times {Time.local(2007, "oct", 1)}
end
test.report("Time.parse: ") do
n.times {Time.parse("20071001")}
end
test.report("Time.quick_parse: ") do
n.times {Time.quick_parse("20071001")}
end
end
Time.quick_parse is a method that I defined, it’s going to be the fastest way to parse a string in the form “YYYYMMDD”:
class Time
class << self
# Usage: Time.quick_parse("YYYYMMDD")
def quick_parse(date_str)
local(date_str[0..3],
RFC2822_MONTH_NAME[date_str[4..5].to_i - 1],
date_str[6..7])
end
end
end
The results:
user system total real
Date.strptime: 2.890000 0.040000 2.930000 ( 2.982972)
Date.parse: 3.630000 0.050000 3.680000 ( 3.755735)
Time.now: 0.010000 0.000000 0.010000 ( 0.008608)
Date.new: 0.590000 0.010000 0.600000 ( 0.597446)
DateTime.civil: 1.640000 0.010000 1.650000 ( 1.675539)
DateTime.parse: 4.970000 0.050000 5.020000 ( 5.066107)
DateTime.strptime: 4.250000 0.050000 4.300000 ( 4.342663)
Time.local: 0.120000 0.000000 0.120000 ( 0.123242)
Time.parse: 1.720000 0.010000 1.730000 ( 1.750917)
Time.quick_parse: 0.150000 0.000000 0.150000 ( 0.157280)
The version of Ruby that I’m using:
ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]
