@shanehanna recently released a first cut of the Swift Object Mapper to rubygems. Swift has come along a fair bit since we started hacking on it as a hobby to see if we can put to rest the criticism that ruby is slow and takes up too much memory.

I ran some benchmarks this morning and found it to be 4x fast on average compared to ActiveRecord and DataMapper. It uses considerably less memory (90% less) as well. If you are inserting a lot of records, you should consider using the Swift::Adapter#write method, as it can lead to tremendous speedup (~50-80x) and memory savings.

Why reinvent the wheel you ask ? Take a look at the numbers below and you will understand. ActiveRecord and DataMapper come with a lot of features and hence some pretty heavy baggage. We realized that most of the time, all we used them for was mapping properties to fields in the database and some basic validations. We realized that we could do this in a much more simpler fashion.

More coming soon …

Swift is not as feature rich as ActiveRecord or DataMapper, it was meant to be a simple and thin abstraction. We’re planning on working on swift-more soon which would have a ton of goodies including validations, associations etc.

Also planned are adapters for SphinxSearch and Mongo. SphinxSearch 1.10 allows you to store fields directly in addition to making them searchable. We plan to either use the real-time indexing feature or xmlpipe2 to persist objects in sphinx directly.

The benchmarks

The bechmark code for each ORM,

• Creates 10,000 records at the start.
• Selects all the records from the database and goes through the results once.
• Selects all the records and updates the fields once for each record.
• GC is disabled to measure the actual memory footprint of each test run.
• ActiveRecord uses mysql2 and pg gems and Swift uses bindings to dbic++.

You can clone the repo, run the tests and see for yourself.

MySQL

benchmark       sys          user        total       rss
dm #create      0.360000     3.650000    4.010000    227.14m
dm #select      0.140000     1.880000    2.020000    128.94m
dm #update      0.710000     8.330000    9.040000    593.20m

ar #create      0.570000     5.360000    5.930000    304.77m
ar #select      0.020000     0.170000    0.190000    22.92m
ar #update      0.560000     5.710000    6.270000    322.95m

swift #create   0.310000     0.680000    0.990000    30.61m
swift #select   0.000000     0.100000    0.100000    9.32m
swift #update   0.140000     0.660000    0.800000    32.26m
swift #write    0.000000     0.070000    0.070000    6.79m

PostgreSQL

benchmark       sys          user        total       rss
dm #create      0.360000     3.560000    3.920000    245.34m
dm #select      0.110000     1.910000    2.020000    129.11m
dm #update      0.590000     7.910000    8.500000    604.77m

ar #create      1.030000     7.100000    8.130000    367.80m
ar #select      0.030000     0.320000    0.350000    38.82m
ar #update      0.800000     6.630000    7.430000    361.91m

swift #create   0.220000     0.680000    0.900000    30.60m
swift #select   0.010000     0.070000    0.080000    9.82m
swift #update   0.100000     0.890000    0.990000    32.66m
swift #write    0.000000     0.080000    0.080000    7.30m