Ruby 1.8.7 vs 1.9.3 performance

There are plenty of Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 benchmark results out there, and this is by no means as thorough as most.  I thought I'd share the results for one of my websites when I upgraded it from Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 1.9.3 as demonstrated in my New Relic report for the site. Conveniently, I upgraded the site on a Monday morning, and since that's also when New Relic reports switch over, it provided a fairly clean week-to-week comparison (perhaps 1/3 of Monday 10/22 was still Ruby 1.8.7).

High Level Summary

With no other changes, other than fixes required to allow the application to work with Ruby 1.9.3, simply upgrading Ruby resulted in the overall response time average for the week dropped from 304ms to 72ms (a 76.32% drop in response time).

Unfortunately, the week immediately before the upgrade was a bit of an anomaly.  The week before that had a 153ms average response time, which is more in line with typical weekly results.  However, that's still a 53% reduction in response time from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3.

Here's a daily comparison for the 3 weeks:

Ruby 1.8.7 

Ruby 1.9.3

Keep up the good work, Ruby development team!