Speedy Version Sorting

Last week I offered fame and fortune to anyone who could speed up our version_sorter. It’s used to sort a repo’s tags:

This morning I ran the numbers and the winner is…

Pope!

Special thanks to binary42, pope, jordi, ahoward, jqr, and mikeauclair for speeding up the code.

Here are my benchmarks from fastest to slowest. I used this script with this dataset to run them.

version_sorter benchmarks
sorting 1,311 tags 100 times

original
                          user     system      total        real
sort                 49.840000   0.570000  50.410000 ( 60.088636)
rsort                51.610000   0.610000  52.220000 ( 61.462576)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
pope
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  0.650000   0.010000   0.660000 (  0.686630)
rsort                 0.740000   0.010000   0.750000 (  0.806579)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
jordi
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  1.770000   0.020000   1.790000 (  1.930918)
rsort                 2.240000   0.020000   2.260000 (  2.477109)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ahoward
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  2.360000   0.020000   2.380000 (  2.581706)
rsort                 2.480000   0.030000   2.510000 (  2.796861)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
binary42
                          user     system      total        real
sort                  4.170000   0.050000   4.220000 (  4.693593)
rsort                 4.470000   0.050000   4.520000 (  5.112159)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
mikeauclair
                         user     system      total        real
sort                 44.060000   0.530000  44.590000 ( 54.701128)
rsort                46.280000   0.540000  46.820000 ( 54.965692)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
jqr
                          user     system      total        real
sort                 48.800000   0.540000  49.340000 ( 56.063984)
rsort                50.970000   0.580000  51.550000 ( 59.799366)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Pope wrote a C extension, but jordi and ahoward had impressive pure-Ruby implementations as well. Check out all the entries:

Images: