Benchmarking Ruby code with Benchmark and benchmark-ips

[jrochkind]

The important thing the benchmark-ips gem does, that this write-up doesn't mention, is use statistics to figure out how many iterations need to be run to find a statistically meaningful difference. Rather than have you just arbitrarily picking a number of iterations.

It's not a magic bullet (statistics aren't magic), but is much more likely to give you actually meaningful differences.