February 2015 Archives

Always make_immutable (unless you have a very good reason not to)

One hears that __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable is a must all your Moose classes. ( edit, ht ribusushi: never immutate your moo classes, it'll inflate them into Moose classes automatically thus defeating the point). Here's a stark reminder of why.

I was doing some benchmarks on a web application that I've been moving from mod_perl to plack. Here's the performance of 350 requests forking off in batches of 7 before I remembered to make_immutable:

$ time perl 002-hammer_lightly.t 
# Total number of requests = 350
real    1m11.095s
user    0m3.003s
sys 0m1.336s

And after:

$ time perl 002-hammer_lightly.t 
# Total number of requests = 350

real    0m17.075s
user    0m2.202s
sys 0m1.160s

One line of code, nearly 5-fold performance improvement. And despite the shim upon shim I had to make to move the thing off modperl, it seems to be two to three times faster than the modperl app (using an apples to pears comparison method anyway).

About kd

user-pic Australian perl hacker. Lead author of the Definitive Guide to Catalyst. Dabbles in javascript, social science and statistical analysis. Seems to have been sucked into the world of cloud and devops.