rails ruby-prof and benchmark testing

Question

I'm running Rails 2.2.2. I've read a few articles about ruby-prof and profiling a rails app. And I'm confused as to how things are really working.

I was originally using this tutorial http://snippets.aktagon.com/snippets/255-How-to-profile-your-Rails-and-Ruby-applications-with-ruby-prof to profile my app, and it works. This involves writing your own profile environment and running > RAILS_ENV=profiling ./script/performance/request -n 100 profiling/homepage.rb

So here's my confusion. Somehow, this runs ruby-prof and opens up all the stats etc, but I can't see anywhere where ruby-prof is ever actually called.

So then I read further, and it seems 2.2.2 has benchmarking/profiling built in. So I write a test file in the performance section like so

require 'test_helper'
require 'performance_test_help'

# Profiling results for each test method are written to tmp/performance.
class BrowsingTest < ActionController::PerformanceTest
  def test_worksheet
    get '/reduction/worksheet'
  end
end

and run

rake test:profile

Is this equivalent to what I was doing above, but just now it's integrated into the whole rails framework?

My next question is this. The original script ouput a flat file and html file, but I couldn't figure out how to also get a tree file automatically to open up with KCacheGrind, or in my case MacCallGrind. Can I add formats into my script call?

Edit: running the scripts through rake test seem to actually produce a tree file, great. Mac CallGrind however seems to hang when trying to parse it. Anyone know other tools for viewing these tree files?

Answer 1

Turns out, it's exactly the same, I must have been reading an old tutorial. All the benchmarking and profiling is now in Rails which is awesome. And it outputs txt,html and tree files, also awesome. Now if Only MacCallGrind would work, there's no way I'm installing the 4gb of KDE packages needed just to view a tree file.

Answer 2

Brad, you should contact the author of MacCallGrind and see if there's an update, or whether he/she has a fix for your files.

Oh that's right, that's me. Please email at richard at symbol aggmedia.net, as there is an update about to come out, and I'd love to have Ruby/Rails support available.