Today I found some magic.

include ActiveSupport::Benchmarkable

An ActiveSupport module that provides an AMAZINGLY elegant alternative to the classic Ruby Benchmark class; which I had always considered to be a bit ‘clunky’.

ActiveSupport::Benchmarkable provides you a simple method ‘benchmark’ which you can pass a few options and block through and output the benchmark result to the log. Wrap this block around expensive operations or possible bottlenecks to get a time reading for the operation.

For example, let’s say you thought your data transformattion method was taking too long; you could wrap it in a benchmark block.

<% benchmark 'v' do %>
  <%= expensive_record_transforming %>
<% end %>

That would write something like “Processing some data (143.6ms)” to the log, which you can now use to monitor or compare speed over time (make sure its not getting worse as data size increases) or compared to alternate methods for optimisation.

The ActiveSupport::Benchmarkable docs also indicate that, you may give an optional logger level (:debug, :info, :warn, :error) as the :level option. The default logger level value is :info.

<% benchmark 'Low-level files', level: :debug do %>
  <%= lowlevel_files_operation %>
<% end %>

Finally, you can pass true as the third argument to silence all log activity (other than the timing information) from inside the block. This is great for boiling down a noisy block to just a single statement that produces one log line:

<% benchmark 'Process data files', level: :info, silence: true do %>
  <%= expensive_and_chatty_files_operation %>
<% end %>

while these samples are indicative of what they would look like in a .html.erb file (view) – it also works in any other place you use the mix in.

I have personally used these to great success in controllers and models to help diagnose specific controller/model operations suspected to be slow.

This ActiveSupport module is an immensely powerful tool to have in a developers arsenal. I highly recommend it’s use.