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