Rails Benchmarking Reloaded

While evaluating caching strategies in Rails 3.1, I found existing articles comparing rails cache store backends to be quite lacking and/or outdated. The last article I could find compares file_store to mem_cache_store. Given that mem_cache_store is being replaced by "Dalli", it seems that existing benchmarks comparing the available options for rails cache backends are lacking in their ability to provide value with respect to the options available today.

• File Store
• Memcached Store
• Dalli
• Mongo Store
• Redis Store

Test

	require 'benchmark'
	task :benchmark => :environment do
	stores = {
	:file_store=>[Rails.root+"/tmp/cache"],
	:mem_cache_store=>["localhost"],
	:dalli_store=>["localhost"],
	:redis_store=> [],
	:mongo_store=> [],
	}
	actions = {
	:hit => lambda {
	Rails.cache.fetch("test")
	},
	:miss => lambda {
	Rails.cache.read("test"+rand().to_s[0..10])
	}
	}
	stores.each do |store,args|
	ActionController::Base.cache_store = store, *args
	puts "Cache Store: #{store}"
	marks = Benchmark.bm(15) do |x|
	actions.each do |label, proc|
	puts "Action: #{label}"
	Rails.cache.delete("test")
	Rails.cache.fetch("test") { [Time.now, 1.year.ago] }
	x.report("times:") do
	20000.times do
	proc.call
	end
	end
	end
	end
	end
	end

view raw cachemark.rake hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Results

Though it looks like mongo-store demonstrates the best overall performance, it should be noted that a mongo server is unlikely to be used solely for caching (the same applies to redis), it is likely that non-caching related queries will be running concurrently on a mongo/redis server which could affect the suitability of these benchkmarks.