ruby1.8: pthreads kills performance

[Sam Quigley]

Package: ruby1.8
Version: 1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1.2
Severity: important

hi,

as discussed here --
http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/10/reflections-on-the-ruby-shootout/
-- among other places, the version of ruby1.8 that ships in ubuntu has
the --enable-pthreads option compiled in, which leads to a serious
performance penalty for most users.  Ruby 1.8's support for threads
isn't particularly mature anyway, so having pthreads compiled in
probably doesn't help many people; the performance boost from removing
it, however, would probably improve most people's experience.  It'd be
great if you could disable pthreads by default.  Some quick googling
suggests that other *nixes have followed this strategy, and that it
doesn't break anything.

-sq


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
   APT prefers hardy-updates
   APT policy: (500, 'hardy-updates'), (500, 'hardy-security'), (500,  
'hardy-backports'), (500, 'hardy')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-21-xen (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL  
set to C)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages ruby1.8 depends on:
ii  libc6               2.7-10ubuntu4        GNU C Library: Shared  
libraries
ii  libruby1.8          1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1.2 Libraries necessary to  
run Ruby 1.

ruby1.8 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information