Three Ruby Links #7

If I were to recommend three articles published last week to read, here is what I would recommend:

1️⃣ “Benchmarking Ruby Parsers” by Benoit Daloze

Considering that Prism is being added as a parser to Ruby with the vision of becoming the default parser in the future, I think benchmarking the current parsers is essential. In this article, Benoit Daloze runs the benchmarks and explains the results.

2️⃣ “Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection” by Jean Boussier

In this article, Jean Boussier discusses the new out-of-band Garbage Collector they are testing at Shopify deployed on around 50% of their production servers and seeing amazing results. The way it works is that the Garbage Collector is disabled during the request and started after the request is finished, and only if the next GC is major.

3️⃣ “Rails with Postgres - Fuzzy Searches” by Bill Tihen

This is an excellent article on implementing fuzzy searches with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Bill Tihen shows how functions like similarity and word_similarity generate similarity scores that indicate how closely the data matches the search query, allowing for partial or potentially misspelled matches. The article has code samples that you can run and play with the formulas presented here.

As a close second to this topic of searches with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails, you should probably also check out this article, “Speed Up Compound Full-Text Searches in PostgreSQL by 300x" by Julian Rubisch.

You can find a lot more articles to read in the full edition of Short Ruby Newsletter at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-112