ThoughtWorks Mingle: is JRuby always this slow?

I’ve set up ThoughtWorks Mingle on Ubuntu 7.04.

No significant problems so far, though a couple of observations. The system requirements are substantial – 2GHz processor, 2GB RAM – which is OK for a new server, but rules out ideas like installing on a VM on the Internet.

It’s easy to see the reason for the high system requirements. Mingle feels slow, even with just a dummy project that has hardly any content. Maybe that’s the price of being first to market with a commercial product built in JRuby. Trouble is, performance is a feature, and exactly the kind of detail ThoughtWorks needs to get right in order to attain high usability.

Second disappointment: Mingle integrates with Subversion, but the repository needs to be on the same machine. Mine is out on the Internet, on one of those VMs that’s not up to running Mingle. Apparently this will be fixed in a later release. In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to set up a local Subversion for testing.

This is the first release, and no doubt ThoughtWorks will find ways to improve performance. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

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4 thoughts on “ThoughtWorks Mingle: is JRuby always this slow?”

  1. In general we’ve been saying that JRuby is “about on par” with the current release version of Ruby, version 1.8.6. There are areas where it’s slower and areas where it’s faster, and they usually balance out. We’ve also heard from a number of folks that JRuby usually exceeds their expectations for performance, and often beats Ruby 1.8.6 by a substantial margin.

    We’ve of course been on the receiving end of TW’s performance work and concerns, and as I understand it they’ve been happy enough with the general performance to continue using JRuby. I think the problem you might be running into is that Mingle is a fairly large application and Rails often takes some tweaking for very large apps…potentially tweaking that hasn’t happpened.

    Of course, I’m not a TW guy, so I don’t know all the work they’ve done, but I know JRuby’s performance is good and getting better every day.

  2. Hi,

    I’ve been slightly involved with Mingle, and am one of the JRuby core developers. I would like to note that the performance problem isn’t really because of JRuby. In fact, Mingle is more sluggish when running on MRI. That said, there are obviously room for improvement, both for JRuby and for Mingle.

    Cheers

  3. Thanks Charles.

    I think the problem you might be running into is that Mingle is a fairly large application and Rails often takes some tweaking for very large apps…potentially tweaking that hasn’t happpened.

    That’s quite possible. This is an out-of-the-box install.

    Tim

  4. I believe Mingle is a great product for developers and scrum masters. But it must grow up a little moore.
    I´m testing it and must be agree that IS slow. I installed it in a VPS machine on windows 2008 with 4Gb mem. I have 100 MB broadband. Still slow. But the biggest problem I this is the UX-design. Because you need many many clicks to move around and when you have to wait 4-6 second between each click/forms it becames frustrating. The support it not the best either. When asking for accessing it from internet with IIS 7 the told me that it wasn´t supported, wich wasn´t true of course.

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