fibur.markdown

Fibur

Fibur is a library that allows concurrency during Ruby I/O operations without needing to make use of callback systems. Traditionally in Ruby, to achieve concurrency during blocking I/O operations, programmers would make use of Fibers and callbacks. Fibur eliminates the need for wrapping your I/O calls with Fibers and a callback. It allows you to write your blocking I/O calls the way you normally would, and still have concurrent execution during those I/O calls.

Example

Say you have a method that fetches data from a network resource:

require 'net/http'
def network_read uri
  Net::HTTP.get_response uri
end

We need to fetch that data say 100 times, so we'll wrap it in a loop:

100.times { network_read }

If we benchmark this code:

require 'benchmark'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

def network_read uri
  Net::HTTP.get_response uri
end

uri = URI('http://google.com/')

Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report('loop') { 100.times { network_read uri } }
end

On my machine it takes about 5 seconds:

$ ruby test.rb
       user     system      total        real
loop  0.210000   0.070000   0.280000 (  5.731776)

Now lets modify our benchmark to wrap each call to network_read in a Fibur:

require 'benchmark'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'fibur' # use the Fibur gem.

def network_read uri
  Net::HTTP.get_response uri
end

uri = URI('http://google.com/')

Benchmark.bm(5) do |x|
  x.report('loop') { 100.times { network_read uri } }
  x.report('fibur') {
    100.times.map {
      Fibur.new { network_read uri }
    }.map(&:join)
  }
end

Output from our benchmark:

$ ruby -I. test.rb
            user     system      total        real
loop    0.220000   0.070000   0.290000 (  5.732683)
fibur   0.110000   0.050000   0.160000 (  0.197434)

Wrapping each call to network_read in a fibur brought the time down to 0.2 seconds! Using Fiburs, we were able to gain full concurrency during our I/O operations, and we didn't have to modify our network_read method.

Installation

Fibur only works on Ruby 1.9, and you can get it by installing the fibur gem.

How does it work?

I encourage you to check out the source.

Really excited to hear about the feature roadmap for Fibur 2.0.

太坑爹了！

HaHaHa. The test is awesome.

LOOOOL this is the best library ever made!

Fibur = Thread 👍