Benchmark showing that memoizing symbols doesn't make sense.

memoizing_symbols_benchmark.rb

require 'benchmark'

def memoized_symbol
  @memoized_symbol ||= :memoized_symbol
end

def raw_symbol
  :raw_symbol
end

n = 10_000_000

Benchmark.bm(20) do |x|
  x.report("with memoization   ") do
    n.times { memoized_symbol }
  end

  x.report("without memoization") do
    n.times { raw_symbol }
  end
end

=begin
Output:

➜  ruby --version
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin11.4.0]
➜ ruby memoizing_symbols_benchmark.rb
                           user     system      total        real
with memoization       1.640000   0.000000   1.640000 (  1.646549)
without memoization    1.140000   0.000000   1.140000 (  1.131850)

=end