Ruby 1.8’s Dismal Net/HTTP Performance

A week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby's "absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation." He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby's standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http's popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Today, Adam returns with a more scientific analysis of Ruby 1.8.x's HTTP client performance. He discovers that while Ruby 1.8.6 and below have…