Fixing Threads in Ruby 1.8: A 2-10x performance boost (opens in new tab)

Hi. Author here.

Ruby 1.9 uses libpthread which creates stacks for its threads in a similar way (mmap and a guard page).

Note that this is pretty much only measuring thread overhead rather than thread workload throughput. So on an SMP system you'd still have the same problems with blocking I/O and only using one CPU that are part and parcel with green threads. In practice that means for something like a map-reduce pattern on a multi-core system, Ruby 1.9's native threads would win by a significant margin.

Edit: Remembered based on ice799's comment below that in 1.9 the threads still won't be allowed to operate in parallel, which neuters most of the aforementioned benefits to using native threads.

I'm curious why someone would go through the trouble to stay on 1.8?

I've seen quite a few of these "improvement" posts lately, which take a feature of 1.8 and bring it into parity with the performance of 1.9. I always have the feeling that the author is just looking at what 1.9 is already doing and explaining it as if they discovered it themselves.