Shaving time off facter by writing the binary in C

gistfile1.txt

Some facter runs on my dev box using pure ruby bin/facter:

./bin/facter  0.58s user 0.34s system 95% cpu 0.968 total
./bin/facter  0.59s user 0.34s system 96% cpu 0.964 total
./bin/facter  0.60s user 0.35s system 95% cpu 0.991 total

The (somewhat condensed) ruby code of which is here:

    require 'facter/application'
    Facter::Application.run(ARGV)

Now, the same version of facter, but bin/facter was replaced with a simple C equivalent:

./build/facter  0.45s user 0.30s system 94% cpu 0.795 total
./build/facter  0.46s user 0.30s system 95% cpu 0.800 total
./build/facter  0.46s user 0.31s system 96% cpu 0.803 total

The C code of which is here:

    #include <ruby.h>
    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      ruby_init();
      ruby_init_loadpath();
      rb_require("facter/application");
      rb_eval_string("Facter::Application.run(ARGV)");
      ruby_exec();
      return 0;
    }

Thats makes the C based facter binary 175 milliseconds faster on average, for this particular test.