Speedy Version Sorting

Last week I offered fame and fortune to anyone who could speed up our version_sorter. It’s used to sort a repo’s tags:

This morning I ran the numbers and the winner is…

Pope!

Special thanks to @binary42, @pope, @jordi, @ahoward, @jqr, and @mikeauclair for speeding up the code.

Here are my benchmarks from fastest to slowest. I used this script with this dataset to run them.

version_sorter benchmarks
sorting 1,311 tags 100 times

original
                          user     system      total        real
sort                 49.840000   0.570000  50.410000 ( 60.088636)
rsort                51.610000   0.610000  52.220000 ( 61.462576)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
pope
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  0.650000   0.010000   0.660000 (  0.686630)
rsort                 0.740000   0.010000   0.750000 (  0.806579)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
jordi
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  1.770000   0.020000   1.790000 (  1.930918)
rsort                 2.240000   0.020000   2.260000 (  2.477109)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ahoward
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  2.360000   0.020000   2.380000 (  2.581706)
rsort                 2.480000   0.030000   2.510000 (  2.796861)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
binary42
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  4.170000   0.050000   4.220000 (  4.693593)
rsort                 4.470000   0.050000   4.520000 (  5.112159)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
mikeauclair
                         user     system      total        real
sort                 44.060000   0.530000  44.590000 ( 54.701128)
rsort                46.280000   0.540000  46.820000 ( 54.965692)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
jqr
                          user     system      total        real
sort                 48.800000   0.540000  49.340000 ( 56.063984)
rsort                50.970000   0.580000  51.550000 ( 59.799366)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Pope wrote a C extension, but jordi and ahoward had impressive pure-Ruby implementations as well. Check out all the entries:

• pope/version_sorter
• jordi/version_sorter
• ahoward/version_sorter
• binary42/version_sorter
• mikeauclair/version_sorter
• jqr/version_sorter

Written by

Chris Wanstrath

@defunkt