Yicheng Zhou - SerpApi

Nokolexbor - a performance-focused HTML parser for Ruby

There aren't many choices of HTML parsers in the ruby ecosystem. The most obvious one would be Nokogiri, which we used heavily at SerpApi. As time passed, we became gradually unsatisfied with Nokogiri's performance. Though it's mainly relying on libxml2 which is an XML processor written in C, it's not

Ruby

How to detect memory leak in Ruby C extension

Memory leak has been one of the most difficult problems to track down in the C/C++ world. It's also true when it comes to Ruby C extensions. We don't expect memory bloat for a long-running Ruby service. Fortunately, the community has developed great tools to help detect memory leaks.

debugging

How to create Ruby C extension and debug in VS Code

When developing Nokolexbor [https://github.com/serpapi/nokolexbor], I found debugging with gdb or lldb was troublesome because I have to do everything with commands. For me, it will be more delightful to debug with an interactive GUI, which makes it convenient to control breakpoints and steps, inspect values and

A CPU benchmark of cloud providers: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Equinix

SerpApi is CPU-intensive. A search usually takes over 500ms to complete. We are constantly looking for ways to improve the search performance of the API. Apart from optimizing the code, a simple and effective approach will be to upgrade the hardware. You easily get performance upgrades by paying more money.

Benchmarking Rails 6 vs. Rails 7

This blog post is a continued work of Benchmarking Ruby 3.1 (+YJIT) vs. Ruby 2.7 [https://serpapi.com/blog/benchmarking-ruby-3-1-yjit-ruby-2-7/]. We wanted to check the performance of Rails 6.1 and Rails 7.0 compared to Rails 6.0, which we are currently on. With the help of

Optimizing JSON performance in Rails

Scraping search results at SerpApi often involves JSON parsing. SerpApi is also generating large JSON responses, where JSON serialization takes place. It is worthwhile to investigate if we can speed up JSON processing. A quick search of the Ruby ecosystem shows Oj [https://github.com/ohler55/oj] as the best

Benchmarks

Benchmarking Puma 4 vs. Puma 5 vs. Puma 6

Puma 6.0.0 was released on Oct 19, 2022. We are two major versions behind. Let's benchmark Puma 4 vs. Puma 5 vs. Puma 6 and see how they perform. We put our focus on testing the throughput of these versions. The excellent HTTP load generator hey [https://github.

Ruby

Benchmarking Ruby 3.1 (+YJIT) vs Ruby 2.7

We benchmarked Ruby 3.1 (+YJIT) vs Ruby 2.7 in the hope of upgrading our infrastructure.

Benchmarks

The downfall of MongoDB performance

We benchmarked MongoDB 3.4 vs 4.4 vs 5.0 vs 6.0 in the hope of upgrading our 3.4.24 server, but the results were disappointing.

APIs

Use Cases