Ruby performance on a Mac... am I just late to the party?

todd burch

I run makefaces on SU 8 on Windows XP against an 11 x 41 grid of wire frame rectangles. Speed = 0.23 seconds for 451 faces. Not too shabby.

I run SU 8 on Mac 10.5.8 on the same grid (and the same scripts). Speed = 23.48 seconds. 100 times as long. No other processes running, no other scripts even loaded.

Oh, Windows is running on my Mac under VMware Fusion.

Did I miss the memo that SketchUp Ruby performance on a Mac sucks? I've opened a bug report.

thomthom

Shouldn't be such difference, no.

jeff hammond

yeah, similar findings here..

15.89 seconds for 451 faces... su8/10.6.6

(though generate faces via context click when tools on surface is installed gives nearly instantaneous results)

todd burch

Thanks for the confirmation Jeff. I did have a couple runs same as yours.

thomthom

My Windows box:

@unknownuser said:

makefaces.rb: Copyright 2004-2006 Burchwood USA.
Version 1.2 May 14,2006.

There were 954 selected items.

There were 0 non-Edge selected items.
There were 954 Edges selected.

There were 451 face(s) added.
The process lasted: 0.378 Second(s).

I'll see if I can get my Mac hooked up (finally)

(btw, makefaces would run even faster if it didn't use .typename.

todd burch

Yes, that's not all it needs.... It's getting a rewrite too.

Dan Rathbun

Might the diff be your Mac is running Ruby 1.8.5 initial release (2006-08-25), and the PC edition is running 1.8.6-p287 (which I notice is nearing 2.5 years old.) ??

You Mac guys need to find a way to get a newer Ruby Framework installed under Sketchup.

thomthom

@dan rathbun said:

Might the diff be your Mac is running Ruby 1.8.5 initial release (2006-08-25), and the PC edition is running 1.8.6-p287 (which I notice is nearing 2.5 years old.) ??

But wouldn't you then get a speed difference in SU on Windows prior to SU8? Which was running 1.8.0? It's a difference of 100 times, something has to be wrong.

Dan Rathbun

Well run the same tests on 7.x under Ruby 1.8.0 and we'll have numbers to talk about.

I haven't seen the test code.. so I don't know what to look for in the Ruby ChangeLogs.

thomthom

@dan rathbun said:

I haven't seen the test code.. so I don't know what to look for in the Ruby ChangeLogs.

Basically iterates the selection and for each edge: edge.find_faces

Dan Rathbun

Well there is the diff of Objective-C on the Mac, and C++ on Windows.

And as we proved for .. in seems to run twice as fast as each.. but it's a platform difference.

Hmmm... may be that sometime after 1.8.5 (initial) they may have increased the default Ruby starting stack size. (I seem to remember something about that.)

But.. I also thot in other tests, people were saying that Macs ran faster. They are always calling the PC opsys "WinDOSE".

jeff hammond

@dan rathbun said:

You Mac guys need to find a way to get a newer Ruby Framework installed under Sketchup.

i've tried a few things (putting an alias in place of the sketchup ruby.. copying the entire Ruby.framework from os x in place of sketchup.app's Ruby.framework, plus a couple of other things)

sketchup won't launch..

fwiw, sketchup's ruby.frameworks is ~1MB in size where as the osx ruby.frameworks is over 200MB..

i don't mind poking around and experimenting with stuff but since we're dealing with the system library here, i'd rather not poke too much without having a clue about these things ..

i would think that google would have tied into the system ruby if it were as easy as something i'd be able to do.. there must be something else going on.. i mean, a lot of the su team seem to be mac users and i can't imagine why they'd keep an outdated version of ruby in there without some sort of reasoning?

thomthom

@dan rathbun said:

And as we proved for .. in seems to run twice as fast as each.. but it's a platform difference.

?
Platform difference?

for .. in runs faster because it doesn't create a new local scope and new variables. .each creates new objects for each iteration, which is more expensive.

thomthom

Just ran makefaces on my MacMini OSX 10.5

There were 954 selected items.

There were 0 non-Edge selected items.
There were 954 Edges selected.

There were 451 face(s) added.
The process lasted: 2.175241 Second(s).`

thomthom

With pb.update

There were 954 selected items.

There were 0 non-Edge selected items.
There were 954 Edges selected.

There were 451 face(s) added.
The process lasted: 2.502378 Second(s).`

Without pb.update

There were 954 selected items.

There were 0 non-Edge selected items.
There were 954 Edges selected.

There were 451 face(s) added.
The process lasted: 0.433242 Second(s).`

So the lag is due to something in Progressbar.update

jeff hammond

fwiw, i remember when chrisF was making shapebender.. it was super fast at first but then he added progress bar to it and it slowed to a crawl.. i mentioned it to him but i don't think he believed me

thomthom

It all boils down to Sketchup.set_status_text or Sketchup.status_text=. Remove them and the script runs fast.

It seems that OSX always updates the UI even when plugins do heavy processing. As oppose to Windows where the UI stops responding.

So I am guessing the lags comes from that and one should avoid updating the statusbar too often.

thomthom

t=Time.now; 1000.times { |i| Sketchup.status_text = "Foo #{i}" }; puts Time.now - t

OSX: 2.08987 (You see the statusbar update for each iteration.)
Windows: 0.114 (You do see the statusbar update, but the text is a blur as it's much faster.)

Conclusion: Sketchup.status_text= has very poor performance under OSX!

jeff hammond

hmm.. makes me wonder if those two lines are affecting performance of other plugins i have..

here's a list of all the rubies i have which include those lines..

(search term shown in top-right of finder window)

screen 2011-01-30 at 1.39.57 PM.jpg

that said, the only one of those listed rubies that i think could be sped up would be jointPushPull (and shapebender as i mentioned earlier).. if i run it on a more complex surface, it takes a while to complete but i just figured that's how it was.. maybe it's speed-upable on mac?

(not saying that the others aren't affected.. it's just that i use JPP a lot and/or i'm feeding it more complex tasks where as the others that i use are more simple)

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

hmm.. makes me wonder if those two lines are affecting performance of other plugins i have..

It's a good possibility if they call these methods from within loops.
I will have to profile some of my plugins under OSX.